


The Torchwood Archives

by nowhere_dawn_death_phan



Series: TMA Universe Fics [1]
Category: Torchwood
Genre: Multi, TMA AU, based on the magnus archives podcast, excluding season 4, im not tagging every character, sorry - Freeform, the magnus archives au, this is an entire canon rewrite
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-13
Updated: 2020-11-14
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:21:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 33,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26446267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nowhere_dawn_death_phan/pseuds/nowhere_dawn_death_phan
Summary: Fifteen fear gods overlook the world, selecting humans to bring about their own personal apocalypse. But one group of avatars is working against their masters to protect humanity from others like them. Torchwood is ready - are you?(Based on The Magnus Archives, a podcast by Rusty Quill)
Relationships: Gwen Cooper & Team Torchwood, Ianto Jones & Team Torchwood, Jack Harkness & Team Torchwood, Jack Harkness/Ianto Jones, Owen Harper & Team Torchwood, Owen Harper/Toshiko Sato, Toshiko Sato & Team Torchwood, every other ship in the show
Series: TMA Universe Fics [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1977334
Comments: 19
Kudos: 14





	1. Everything Changes

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Not every detail of The Magnus Archives and Torchwood canon fits neatly alongside each other. Some aspects of both The Magnus Archives and Torchwood canon have been edited slightly as a result of this.

The white stripe had appeared the day of her first murder case. Andy had noticed it before she had, walking behind her out of the dark and damp basement. She’d suggested it was just plaster dust, it seemed the most likely answer as his hair and clothes were covered in it too, but it had seemed too uniform to him, too clear and too exact to be the result of some falling powder. She’d realised that for herself when she got out of the shower that evening and it was still there, bright and unmarred against the darkness of her natural hair. Rhys had joked the stress of the job was prematurely aging her when he’d first seen it but had said no more about it, and so Gwen hadn’t either. Dyeing her hair black didn’t cover it, she’d tried time after time and in the end had just given up on trying to hide it. It wasn’t as if it was doing her any harm, after all. It was just odd, something she couldn’t explain nor could anybody else.  
Then she’d woken up one morning with a date lodged in the back of her mind. Thursday 13th September 2007. It was an unremarkable date as far as dates went, not a birthday or holiday, she hadn’t gotten anything planned with Rhys or Andy, it had nothing to do with work. It was just a date, as far as she was concerned. A number on a calendar. There was no reason for it to be nagging at her as much as it was, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that it meant something, that something was going to happen. In the end she had tried not to think about it too much, decided to just wait for the date to come and let whatever was going to happen - if anything - happen. 

She was standing with Andy when it happened, on Thursday 13th September 2007. Again with Andy, always with Andy. The two of them standing shoulder to shoulder in the rain, in the cold, staring at a murder scene with Gwen holding a cup of cooling coffee and a flickering torch. It certainly seemed mysterious enough to her, though she was starting to worry she’d let herself get caught up on a couple of simple coincidences. And that was when the car had pulled up.  
“Who’s that?” She’d asked over the roar of the rain, pointing with the coffee cup to the large black SUV and the four people who had just exited it.  
“Torchwood.” One of the crime scene officers replied, turning back around to watch with an expression she couldn’t place.  
Gwen looked at him, her interest suitably piqued. “What’s Torchwood?”  
“Special Ops, or something. They crop up every now and then, they like to swan around and act like they own the place. The things they get away with, it’s a bloody disgrace.”  
Gwen nodded, her eyes still on the four figures. This was it, surely. This was what she was supposed to find. Torchwood, whoever they were. She turned, half-expecting to bump into Andy gawking like he always did, but apparently he’d been smart enough to scarper so he was far enough away if it all went to shit. He had a habit of getting into trouble with the higher ups, but that also meant he’d learned how to avoid it - and disappearing at the first sign of anything off was his go-to method. Usually this annoyed Gwen, she’d be left to deal with whatever the problem was on her own while he hung around in the back clearing traffic that didn’t need to be cleared or otherwise trying to look productive, but today she didn’t mind. It meant nobody stopped her from heading up the stairs of the multistory car park to get a better look at whatever they were doing. 

“Oestrogen-” one of the four was saying. A tall man, American accent, squinting up into the sky. Gwen couldn’t hear him that clearly over the sound of the rain, but that didn’t really matter. “Definitely Oestrogen. You take the Pill, flush it away. It enters the water cycle, feminises the fish-“ it didn’t seem that any of the people accompanying him were listening to what he was saying, nor did it seem as though this particularly bothered him, “-goes all the way up into the sky, then falls all the way back down on to me. Contraceptives in the rain. Love this planet. Still, at least I won't get pregnant. Never doing that again. How's it going?”  
His last sentence was directed at a young woman, hair plastered to her head by the rain, who was wearing a large metal glove and kneeling near the head of the young man's body. Gwen watched, confused and more than a little intrigued, struggling to hear over the pounding of rain water and her own nervous excitement.  
Crouching just across from her was a slightly younger man, soaked to the skin and holding a small video camera in a tight two-handed grip. Their voices didn’t project as far as the American’s, so their conversation was lost to Gwen, but neither of them seemed particularly happy with their situation, or with each other. Kneeling next to him was another young woman, shorter hair and a jacket collar turned up that did little to keep off the rain.  
There was something snaking up the arms of the woman with the glove, some sort of striped pattern that was hard to make out properly in the dark. Gwen watched, eyes wide, as the metal of the gauntlet glowed bright, so bright she had to turn her head away for a moment to let her eyes adjust. It took her a second to realise the sound of the rain had stopped as well, so deafening was the abrupt silence, and the voices from below were suddenly audible, and the view unobscured by sheets of falling rain. Not that anything she saw or heard made much sense, and the sudden return of the rain once it was all over was welcomed by her, so desperate was she to keep hold of some idea of normalcy in the world that had just been torn out from under her.  
That was Gwen Cooper's first experience with Torchwood, but it most certainly would not be her last. 

She managed to catch the name of one of the agents in the mess of the evening. It was the American man, one Captain Jack Harkness. A man who, as far as she and anybody else could tell, didn’t exist. Not anymore at least. There had once been a Captain Jack Harkness, but he had been reported missing and presumed dead in 1941 with nobody having seen head nor hide of him since, and Gwen knew there was no way that he could possibly be the same man. He might have assumed his identity, but they had to be two different people. Who this supposed Captain Jack had been originally she had no idea, and she wouldn’t know where to start on how to work it out.  
It was by complete chance that she’d bumped into him again, she’d caught him disappearing up a hospital staircase just as she was about to leave. She could have just gone back home to her boyfriend Rhys, back to normality and sharing cold danish pastries with Andy and tossing coins to decide who got to drive. But she followed him up the stairs anyway, because what did she really have to lose by at least trying to figure out what was going on?  
Again, not that what she’d seen had made much sense to her. Captain Jack had somehow disappeared into an area sectioned off that for some reason nobody knew anything about. Unlike at the crime scene the previous night, Torchwood clearly wasn’t trying to attract any attention to their presence there. After that everything had happened too quickly and Andy hadn’t listened to her and Gwen had given in, tired of trying to argue with him about what and who she’d seen. Part of her admired his perseverance in trying to shepard her back in the direction of what she should have been doing, but the other part of her had wanted to figure it out for herself properly, to finally be able to talk to Jack, or one of them, and work out exactly what it was that she’d seen over the last few days. Still, she’d let him drop her off at home before she made her excuses to Rhys and went out again, not happy with lying to him but not content to just let this mystery pass her by either. 

So now here she is, standing outside the supposedly abandoned Tiger Bay tourist office with pizza boxes in her arms, half debating whether she should just turn around and go back to living the closest thing to a boring and normal life that she can.  
Something compels her otherwise though, and she pushes open the door with her foot, stepping into the tourist office.  
It’s considerably darker inside than outside despite the late hour, and it takes Gwen’s eyes a moment to adjust to the glow of the dim and flickering lights. Almost every surface is coated with a thick layer of dust, including the lights themselves, and the place clearly hasn’t been used in some time, which fits the general rumors that it’s a front for something else, though she’s still not entirely sure what. She takes a cautious step forward, looking around for anything that might indicate what she’s supposed to do now. The boy in the pizza place had told her that he typically just left the pizzas on the receptionist desk in the corner, and so she makes her way over towards it. It’s an old desk, lit by one single dim shelf lamp that casts eerie shadows and does a poor job of lighting up anything useful at all.  
She shifts the boxes in her arms, spotting a small piece of folded paper on the desk and moving around the back of the table to look at it, nudging the old dusty computer chair out of the way, the wheels creaking as it rolls until it hits the desk leg and stops. Gwen adjusts the pizza boxes again, holding them with one arm as she reaches out for the piece of paper, trying not to creep herself out too much despite the fact this is very much starting to feel like the opening to one of the crappy horror movies her and Rhys watch when they have nothing better to do.  
The paper simply says “PUSH” in a messy scribble with a crudely drawn arrow pointing downwards towards the surface of the desk. The note is written in black biro, the cheap rollerball kind that Gwen knows from experience stops working every seven letters or so and bleeds ink all over your fingers when you try and fix it. Gwen puts the paper back down, fumbling at the underside of the desk while still trying to balance the boxes. Her fingers come into contact with something that she assumes is a button, and the space behind her that she could have sworn was just a solid wall is now an open doorway. A quick glance at the underside of the desk confirms that it was indeed a button, though that leaves Gwen with more questions than it does answers. She looks around the empty tourist office as though expecting something or someone to appear from somewhere, to demand to know what she’s doing here, but nobody does, so she takes a hesitant step forwards into the seemingly stone hallway hidden behind the wall-that-isn’t-a-wall, glancing over her shoulder again just in case. 

She’s barely two steps in when the wall swings back shut behind her, eliminating any chance of her changing her mind and turning back now. Her steps echo, and she sees now that the walls are built up bricks instead of the smooth stone that she had assumed it would be. There’s a chill in the air very different from the stuffy heat of the office she’s just left behind, but mercifully the passage is better lit than the tourist centre, though not by much. At the end of the stone hallway sits a lift, and Gwen moves towards it, aware there’s nowhere else that she can go now that turning around is out of the question. There’s no obvious control panel for the outside of the lift but the doors open for her and then close behind her as if they know she’s there. The lift also descends without any input from her, and Gwen tries to pretend the twisting of her gut is just from the jerkiness of her descent and not the fear that she’s getting herself into something she can’t get out of.  
When she steps out of the lift again she’s facing another corridor, this one is smooth stone and it’s only a few feet long, a large rolling cog door open so that she can see the wide space that lies beyond it. She walks down the corridor and through the entrance before taking a few steps out into the room, the wheel rolling shut behind her as she does so. Gwen looks around hesitantly, not wanting to make her way any closer into the room just yet, if it can be called a room. Now that she’s standing in it, it looks more like a cavern, maybe five or stories tall, again dimly lit but busy and cluttered with work stations and machines and stretching possibly further than she can see from here in all directions but one.  
She makes her way up a small series of steps that leads past two workstations, hovering somewhat awkwardly. There are three people in the room that she can see, and not a single one of them has so much as glanced at her yet. Above her, Captain Jack Harkness walks a catwalk and heads into what she can only assume to be his office. She’s unsure if she should speak or not, stopping behind one of the workstations and staring at the array of computer screens displaying something that she doesn’t recognise. At the workstation next to her is the man who was holding the camera, his back to her, and Gwen is just preparing herself to speak to him when the woman sitting in front of her laughs. 

Her laugh is a quiet, soft sound and the man next to her spins on his chair to face Gwen and the rest of the room, causing her to recoil a little. He looks dead. Face grey, cheeks sunken. The lab coat he’s wearing hangs awkwardly off a frame that seems to her to be literally just skin and bone, but his eyes are bright and he’s laughing. “I’m sorry! I’m rubbish, I give up!”  
The woman also spins to face her, and Gwen sees something she hadn’t noticed at the crime scene - in the centre of her forehead are six small milky eyes, clustered together like those of a spider and previously hidden behind her hair. “He set me off!”  
“Well, that lasted all of nought point five seconds!” comes a third voice, and Gwen looks up. It’s the other woman, the one who had held the glove. In the better light Gwen can see that the markings on her arms are tattoos, heavy thick lines of black ink, and her eyes are jet black too, filmed over with the whites and irises stained the colour of tar.  
The seemingly dead man points at her apologetically, and she looks back at him. “Um, those pizzas are going to be no good by the way.”  
Jack Harkness appears out of what Gwen can only assume is his office, leaning against the empty doorway. “Owen!”  
The man, who Gwen assumes is Owen, shrugs helplessly and waves a hand. “I know, I know. I’m sorry, alright? I can’t help it. Look, I’ll buy the next lot of food, yeah?”  
“Right Tosh, you better hold him to that.” The woman with the tattoos says, and Owen turns briefly to look at her. “She will, Suzie, and you know it.”  
Gwen puts the pizzas down, unsure of what else to do with them, and Owen turns back around to face her, leaning forwards and flipping open each box lid one by one with a pencil. All of the pizzas are shrivelled and dotted with mould when only minutes ago they were fresh, and Gwen gapes. “H-How?”  
Owen raises the hand still holding the pencil. “My fault. Got over excited. Sorry about that. You’re fine though, it only got the pizza.”  
Tosh looks at him in something that seems like both shock and pride, leaning forwards in her seat as well. “You redirected it?”  
Owen looks at her and shakes his head, leaning back in his seat as if to escape her field of vision. “Nah, can’t manage that yet. I know where it’s going now though, at least.”  
Suzie stands up, her voice carrying. “That’ll make our lives a lot easier then. At least we won’t have to go hunting around the Hub looking for anything that’s gone off now.”  
Owen turns around to look at her, his chair creaking as it spins in a lazy half-circle. “Yeah, alright Suzie, well we can’t all reanimate the dead.”  
“Nope, some of us just make flowers wilt when we get stroppy.” She shoots back at him, though it seems friendly enough.

Gwen looks between them, apparently seeming confused enough that Jack decides to take pity on her. “You two, stop squabbling. You’re supposed to be working, remember? Or have you forgotten what it is that we do here? Tosh, how’s that alibi looking for the porter from the hospital?”  
Tosh turns away from Owen, looking up at Jack. “I’ve changed the work rota and planted a false witness, so he has an alibi for the next forty-eight hours. I’m letting Owen deal with the specifics of handling the body, but-”  
Owen butts in, kicking his foot out at the table leg. “By the time they pull him out of the bay on Tuesday, he’ll only have been missing for two days.” He looks across at Tosh, grinning. “You talk as you type.”  
Jack nods approvingly. “Very good, the both of you.”  
Gwen steps forward, suddenly finding her tongue again. “He’s dead. A man is dead and you’re covering it up like it’s nothing?”  
Tosh nods, not seeming at all bothered. “That’s my job.”  
Gwen looks at Jack, confused and more than a little appalled. “Who are you?”  
Jack smiles as if he’s been waiting his entire life for this moment. “We’re Torchwood.”  
Gwen bites back the urge to say that hadn’t been what she’d meant. She doesn’t want to know about Torchwood, she wants to know about him. Captain Jack Harkness, the man who doesn’t exist. But Jack is already moving away towards another section of the room that she can’t see, beckoning for her to follow him.  
She huffs and then does, asking where they’re going.  
He stops short, glancing at her out of the corner of his eye. “You saw the murder. Thought you might like to see the murderer as well.” 

He leads her away from the main section of the Hub and down a ladder into a damp room that is lined on both sides with perforated glass walls, forming crude holding cells. In the nearest one sits the so-called murderer, though Gwen finds it hard to think of it as being such once she gets another look at it. It’s just an animal to her. Animals don’t murder, don’t kill for the sake of it. They do it to survive.  
“It’s a Weevil.” Jack says simply once she’s positioned in front of the glass, as if he expects Gwen to know what that means, as if that one word is somehow supposed to make the last two days make sense to her.  
She just looks at him, tearing her eyes away from the animal for a moment. “A what?”  
Jack sighs, shifting to lean against the wall, and points at the creature. “A Weevil. Or at least, that’s what we call them, we don’t know if they have a name for themselves since they’re not too good at communicating with us in a way that we can understand. There’s a couple hundred of them living in the sewers under the city, they’re quite fast at breeding from what we can tell. They tend to mostly keep to themselves, but every now and then one of them will go rogue, come to the surface, attack. It’s our job to keep an eye on them, minimise the damage.”  
“What is it?” Gwen asks softly. “Really, what is it?”  
Jack smiles again like this is a moment he’s wanted forever. “It’s an avatar of The Hunt. We think they must reproduce, very few avatars of one species are formed by a single entity so quickly. Three weevils appear at once, sure. Anymore than that, it just isn’t heard of. They must have been around for years to build up the population level they have if they aren’t rapid reproducers.”  
His explanation hasn’t helped Gwen understand at all, and he must be able to tell because he lays his hand on her shoulder, leading her back towards the ladder. “Come back up into the Hub, the others can help me explain.” 

The others have gathered around one of the desks when they come back up the stairs, muttering to themselves quietly. The dead man keeps glancing over at them, and clears his throat conspicuously when she gets into earshot, swinging his chair around.  
“Owen Harper.” Jack points at him, and then at Gwen. “Gwen Cooper.”  
It’s a shoddy attempt at an introduction, though when Gwen puts her hand out for Owen to shake, he doesn’t take it. Instead he glares at Jack. “That’s Doctor Owen Harper, thank you.”  
Jack ignores him, pointing instead at the woman sitting next to him. “Toshiko Sato, Gwen Cooper.”  
“Just Tosh,” she amends, raising her hand in a small wave which Gwen returns.  
“And this-” Jack gestures to the other person in the room, the tattooed woman. “-is Suzie Costello, my second in command. And that’s the team.”  
Gwen looks around at them all in disbelief. “That’s it? There’s just four of you?”  
She’d imagined that there’d be more, she finds it hard to believe that such a big facility houses only four people, that they really manage to achieve everything that they have claimed with only four of them, that they’re taken as seriously as they are with only four of them.  
Jack nods. “There used to be more of us. But it’s hard to find avatars that aren’t dead set on ending the world these days, so we take what we can get. And we don’t operate under a one entity policy, so it’s not like we can just pick random people off of the street like Yvonne used to.”  
“You keep telling me all these things.” Gwen shakes her head. “Why? I know your names, your base of operations, I know about that Weevil, and that you’re covering up the death of the porter. This is supposed to be a secret, right? Classified?”  
Jack leans against Owen’s desk. “This is well beyond classified.”  
“Then why are you telling me? What do you gain from it? I know too much now.” Gwen takes a sudden step back, her eyes meeting Jack’s. “What are you going to do to me?”  
She has the sudden idea of being thrown into the Weevil’s cage, of being attacked like the porter or maybe even eaten, of Rhys never knowing what happened to her, and then Jack looks up at her, his eyes wicked. “Why? What are you imagining?”  
His voice holds a different kind of wickedness to it, and Gwen looks away, plunging her hands deeper into the pockets of her leather jacket, but he only laughs and turns to the others. “Tosh, finish that calibration in the morning. Owen, first thing tomorrow I want you to get a hold of Chandler and Bell because Tosh thinks they’re lying. On second thoughts, Tosh, I want you to focus on doing that with him. Suzie, we both know that it’s a pain in the ass but I need the costing on the glove research as soon as you can get it to me. And as for you-” Jack clicks his fingers and points at Gwen. “-with me.”

Gwen sighs, but finds herself falling into an obedient step behind him as he strides away. She glances over at the others as they get ready to leave and then frowns at Jack’s back. “I’m starting to get tired of following you around.”  
Jack stops and turns so suddenly that she almost walks into him, and again he’s smiling at her, that smile like he somehow knows something that she doesn’t. “No, you aren’t. And you never will.”  
Gwen stares at him as he turns back around, unsure what exactly that means, wondering if he intends on keeping her around. She’s not sure how that would work, if that’s even what she wants.  
“Come on!” He says, holding his hand out to her. He’s standing on a raised stone platform, and Gwen reluctantly takes the offered hand, letting him help her up next to him. Both Owen and Tosh wave and call out their goodbyes as they leave, but Suzie is still flitting from desk to desk, either looking for something or just tidying before she leaves.  
Jack looks down at her, and smiles again. “I love this bit. You came in through the front door, right? So, why don’t you take a look at the scenic route?”  
Gwen goes to ask him what he means when he pushes a series of buttons on his wrist strap and the platform they’re standing on judders before starting to rise. She feels herself unbalance and immediately reaches for Jack, who loops his arm around her shoulder to keep her steady. Gwen resists the urge to look down at the floor as it drops away beneath them, though she sees Jack lean forwards and wave at somebody below them - Suzie, she assumes. Instead, she tilts her head backwards and looks up at the open patch of sky slowly getting closer. It’s vaguely disorienting, making her feel like if she leant backwards far enough she’d tumble straight out into the swirling nebula above her. She doesn’t though, Jack’s hand on her shoulder keeps her firmly on the platform and she looks back down as the platform reaches the surface, slotting into place alongside the others that run along the edge of the water tower. 

There are people walking past, talking on phones or to each other or walking alone, heads down to keep out the cold of the evening. But none of them look across, none of them seem to take any interest in the fact that two people have just risen out of an ominous hole from underneath the water tower.  
“They can see us, can’t they?” Gwen asks, looking back up at Jack. “I mean, we’re right out in the open.”  
“Do they look like they can see us?” There’s a mocking tone to Jack’s voice, and Gwen frowns, looking back out at the people walking past.  
“Well, no. But look at us, Jack, we couldn’t be any more public here.”  
Jack squeezes her elbow and then calls out to one of the nearest men. He’s on his phone, but Jack speaks loud enough that he should still be able to hear him, but he doesn’t even look up. Jack turns his attention to the woman behind him, doing the same thing again, and once more gets no response.  
Jack shifts on his heels and looks back at Gwen. “It’s called a perception filter, it stops people from seeing us. We sort of register, but we’re more like a speck in the corner of their vision, we’re not quite there. But it only works in this spot, so if I do this-”  
He steps forwards, pulling Gwen with him and raising a hand at another woman, calling out. She looks up at him, her eyes scanning both of them before her brow furrows and she carries on.  
“-And lo, we are perceived.” He sounds far too gleeful, too proud of himself for some reason that Gwen can’t put her finger on.  
“How does it work?”  
Jack looks at her, and then at the platform behind her, perfectly blending in with the others. “If I had to guess, I’d say that there was once a dimensionally transcendental chameleon circuit placed right on this spot which welded its perception properties to a spatio-temporal rift.”  
He must be able to see the confusion on Gwen’s face because he smiles again. “But that’s a little too complicated, don’t you think? Invisible lift has more of a ring to it.”  
Gwen looks at the slab that moments before was a hole, thinking intently before turning back to Jack, a question already forming on her lips. “Hang on a minute, if nobody can see that there’s anything missing when the lifts coming up then there’s just a bloody great hole in the floor.”  
“So?” Jack raises a questioning eyebrow at her.  
“I mean, don’t people fall in?”  
Jack rolls his eyes and scoffs, tipping his head back. “That is so Welsh.”  
Gwen gapes a little at him, not liking how she always seems to always be a step behind. “What is?”  
Jack shakes his head and jabs at the air between them half-heartedly. “I show you something incredible, and you pick fault with it. Now, come on. We don’t have all night now, do we?”

Jack Harkness leads her to a bar, not one that she’s ever been in before but not one that is so far removed from her regular life that she can summon up a decent excuse for why she’s never been in it before if she tries to. And she tries all right.  
“So-” Jack has a glass of water that sits untouched on the polished surface beside them. Gwen is already halfway through her pint. Jack’s paying, and she intends to make the most of this little questioning session. She’s a little frustrated that he isn’t drinking himself, alcohol tends to loosen the tongue and that’s precisely what she wants from him right now. “-You probably have questions for me, right?”  
Gwen nods, though she’s completely unsure as to where she’s supposed to start, or even where she wants to start. There’s so much that she doesn’t understand so far, so many things that need answering, and from what Jack said earlier it seems she only has tonight to get the answers that she wants.  
Jack nods, finally taking a sip from his water. “Okay. That’s a start. So, what do you want to cover first? Let’s see, we have the murder of John Tucker, you must have questions about that. Or the Weevil, your first experience with an avatar. Though if your first experience with one is with a Weevil then you’re not likely to have a second, which is where you got lucky.”  
“Avatars.” Gwen repeats. “You keep saying that. Avatars. What are they? They’re not all like those things, those Weevils?”  
Jack shakes his head. “We’re avatars. All five of us. There are gods, and we serve those gods, gain powers from them, carry out their orders, that sort of thing.”  
“Five?” Gwen asks, trying to count over the team members that she’d met. Jack, Owen, Tosh, Suzie. Was there somebody else?  
Jack smiles again, that sort of smile that makes her feel like she’s lagging further and further behind. “That stripe in your hair isn’t natural, is it?”  
Gwen instinctively touches a hand to the strands of white, but Jack hasn’t finished talking.  
“I’m guessing it appeared the day something big happened, right? Something emotional, something that you had a powerful connection with?”  
Gwen nods, looking away for a moment, letting her hand drop.  
“You going to tell me what it was or am I supposed to guess? Only, I’ve never been much good at those sorts of games.” Jack asks her almost teasingly, and Gwen looks back up at him, her eyes hard.  
“The day I saw my first murder scene.”  
Jack’s face falls, though he tries hard not to show it. “Shame. We already have an avatar of The End. Not much point in having two of you, and Suzie’s already far more developed than any of the others so I don’t really want to lose her.”  
“The End?” Gwen echoes, trying her hardest to keep up.  
“The End.” Jack agrees. “There are fifteen gods, with each god representing the fear of something. The End is the entity surrounding the fear of death. Suzie is an avatar for that entity, the power that it gives her is the ability to briefly reanimate the dead using the glove that you saw the other night. Are things starting to make sense now?”  
Gwen takes another sip of her beer. “How do you know which fears have gods? There are more than fifteen things to be scared of on earth, surely.”  
Jack smiles, a different sort of smile than the one she’s starting to get used to. “A very good question. The fifteen gods represent primal fears, those that have been around almost as long as mankind. The fear of pain, of death, of being hunted, of being trapped, of heights, the list goes on. And not all of them are human fears, the fear of being eaten comes from animals. It’s a lot to unload on somebody all at once.”  
“Where are they then, these gods?”  
Jack points up at the roof above them and then laughs, shaking his head. “We don’t know. Not really. They exist outside of this reality, sort of floating around in whatever dimension they live in. They try and get through, but they can’t.”

Gwen just nods, finishing her beer and frowning. “So, what exactly do you do then, Torchwood?”  
Jack sits forwards. “See, this is where the interesting bit starts. The job of an avatar, first and foremost, is to end the world. That’s what we’re designed to do. Almost every entity has a ritual, a series of actions to complete that allows it to pass fully into this world and bring out the sort of destruction that allows that fear to rule. And it’s up to avatars to complete that ritual, which is what most of them do. But not us. What we do is we track down other avatars and we deal with them before they can get too out of control. Like the Weevil from the hospital. Now, that Weevil isn’t exactly going to bring about world domination on it’s own, we have no idea how much they understand about their creation and purpose, but there are human avatars of The Hunt as well, and they would certainly try to complete their ritual.”  
“That’s a hell of a job.” Gwen says, trying to wrap her head around it all. “Who do the others serve then? If you won’t employ more than one avatar for each entity then they must all be different, right?”  
Jack nods. “Owen serves The Corruption, the fear of disease and rot, with an inclination towards some forms of desire. And Toshiko serves The Eye, which is the fear of being watched and examined, along with the desire for knowledge even if it’s information that is detrimental to either obtain or know.”  
“And you?” Gwen asks, taking a sip from her second beer. “Who do you serve?”  
Jack smiles again, it’s all he seems to do and it’s a little frustrating to Gwen that she’s letting him get away with it. “Well, if I told you that, there wouldn’t be any mystery, would there?”  
“There’s enough mystery around you already,” Gwen tells him, and Jack raises his eyebrows in intrigue, shuffling on his chair.  
“How so?”  
“I did some research. There’s only one Captain Jack Harkness on record and he went missing in 1941.”  
“Well, there’s no possible way that could be me, is there?” Jack asks her, and she’s not entirely sure if she’s supposed to answer him or not. “Besides, we don’t just catch avatars. There are certain bits of technology, like the glove, either formed by previous avatars or by people that just want to try and harness the powers of the entity without actually being gifted the power. We store those bits of technology, lock them all away so they can’t fall into the wrong hands.”  
“How do you know that you’re the right hands?” Gwen challenges, shifting her head against her palm.  
“That is a very good question, and the answer is that nobody is allowed to take any avatar technology out of the Hub without express permission from me, which limits the potential for problems.”  
\-------------------------------------------  
Several streets away, Owen Harper stands in his apartment bathroom, looking at a small square spray bottle made of glass with a plastic stopper that sits innocently in his cabinet. It’s something he took from the Hub a little over a week ago and he’s been waiting for a free moment to use it ever since. The Corruption is magnetising and being an avatar of it has made him the same, he already knows that. People naturally feel a pull towards him, a desire to have him in some form, and not always a sexual one. It tends to fade as the person in question spends more time around him, and it’s not naturally strong enough to make people just throw themselves at him. They have the desire but they’re able to resist it. And this small bottle is supposed to change that, so the faded label says. It’s something that’s been in the Hub for years, something that makes The Corruption stronger, an easy way of maximising the desire for a short length of time. He’s aware that the morality of this is dubious at best, but he’s not going out with the intention of going home with anybody, it’s purely for scientific reasons. To see if it actually works, to see how far removed from humanity someone can become when the power flowing through them is artificial instead of their own.  
So he pockets the bottle and goes out to a bar, sees a girl, they talk for a while. She’s leaning closer and closer like she’s waiting for a signal and he gives in. The kiss is just a kiss to him. Nice, but nothing special. She, on the other hand, comes away feeling like she’s just won the lottery. He tries it out again on her boyfriend, it seems to him like a better alternative than getting punched in the face, and then he shoves them both into the closest taxi before walking back to his apartment, throwing the bottle in the bin the second he gets through the front door. It works, he certainly isn’t going to doubt that, but he doesn’t like it. It brings with it a certain emptiness, a void that comes with knowing that the motions are driven not by wanting but by compulsion, and the longer he dwells on it, the worse it makes him feel. 

A little further in the opposite direction, Tosh stands next to her bookcase, scanning one book after another with a small metal device. She’s already tested it on one book, even just simply running the machine over the spine captures every word on each page. She doesn’t know if there’s anything that she can do with it in the long run, any way that she can use it to her advantage. Having the technology available helps, she supposes, even if it doesn’t do anything to enhance the powers that she already has. She knows most pieces of technology like this were created by those that were touched but never claimed as a way of getting closer to their relevant entity, so she shouldn’t really expect it to give her any sort of advantage. It’s a design meant to level the playing field a little more, but it’s still interesting for her to mess around with. She knows the dangers of poking her head into things that she shouldn’t, but she can’t help it. It’s what makes her who she is. She wouldn’t be an avatar of The Eye if she didn’t have a desire for knowledge, and if she isn’t an avatar of The Eye then she isn’t anything at all. 

Suzie Costello watches a fly buzz around her living room, making to slide her hand out of the heavy metal gauntlet that she’d slipped into her bag while nobody was paying attention, but stopping. It’s taken her a while to build up the trust that she has, but she’s second in command now. It’s not like she joined with the intention of tearing Torchwood down from the inside, it’s not like she wants to end the world. She’s still intent on stopping the rituals while she can. It doesn’t matter to her either way, though. There is no ritual for The End. It doesn’t need one. All things come to It eventually. There is nothing that manages to escape It’s claws. The End doesn’t need a ritual to rule the world - It already does.  
Suzie lashes out at the fly suddenly, swiping the gauntlet through the air and closing her fingers around the buzzing insect, crushing it in her clumsy grip. She opens her hand and the fly falls to the carpet, silent once more. Suzie looks down at it for a moment and then pulls the glove off, slipping it back into her bag. They can’t blame her for this. Death is in her blood.  
\-----------------------------------------------  
“So, go on then, how exactly did you end up in Cardiff?” Gwen asks Jack, shifting on her barstool again. “You just fancied it, did you?”  
Jack smiles, that bloody smile that really ought to be getting on her nerves but isn’t for some reason she can’t place. “We’re Torchwood Three, Torchwood Cardiff. Torchwood London was destroyed about a year ago, it wasn’t pretty. Torchwood Two is a strange little office in Glasgow run by a strange little man. Torchwood Four - it’s kind of missing in action right now, but I’ll find it again one day. We operate in the most densely populated cities. For some reason, avatars are more likely to crop up in bigger cities than small towns, we think it’s because it’s easier for them to blend into crowds.”  
“But surely there are avatars all over the world, what do you do about those?”  
Jack shrugs, taking another sip of his water. “We leave them, hope they don’t cause too much trouble. There’s not enough of us to branch across the entire globe, we’ve been stretched thin enough in Britain since Torchwood One fell, and Archie is the only agent at Torchwood Two. There’s five of us defending an entire island.”  
Gwen nods. “What about you then? Where are you from, because you’re not a local. America somewhere, right?”  
Jack raises one shoulder in a half shrug. “I’m from lots of places.”  
“Right. Because the thing is, see, we could liaise on this.” Gwen suggests, leaning a little closer on her stool. She could also use it to gain more information on Jack and this whole avatar business, to see if he’s being genuine or if there’s something more going on.  
Jack raises an eyebrow. “This?”  
“The killing.” Gwen says simply. “I could be your liaison with the police.”  
“Oh,” says Jack, in sudden understanding. “Oh. You think that because we were at the crime scene, we want to catch the killer. No, no that’s nothing to do with us.”  
“Then why were you there?”  
“Testing the glove. It only works on the newly deceased and the more violent the death, the stronger the connection between the victim and the person using the glove. That’s why murder victims work best. It’s a way for Suzie to develop and test her powers. We try to make sure everyone is able to perform the best that they can, and it’s just a convenient way of practising for her.”  
“But you were asking him. John Tucker, I mean. You were asking him about his killer.”  
Jack laughs. “The kid had just been murdered, what else was I going to ask him about?”  
“You could get us an ID. You could help us.” Gwen can feel herself getting frustrated. A kid, an innocent kid, has been killed, and she has the potential to get justice for him if she can get Jack to understand exactly why it’s so important to her.  
“We’re busy.” He says it so flippantly, like it doesn’t matter to him, and Gwen scoffs.  
“And your work is more important, right?”  
Jack clicks his fingers and points at her, looking so pleased with himself that Gwen has to fight back the urge to lean forwards and slap him. “See, now you’re getting somewhere.”  
Gwen stands, leaving her hands flat on the bar. “Well that’s tough shit, because I’ve got a duty if you let me go. The stuff that you have could help us, and I can tell my people about it.”  
Jack smiles wider, that cocky little smile, and Gwen feels herself bristle. “If you remember.”  
“What?”  
The smile grows, becomes almost arrogant. “How’s your drink?”  
Gwen eyes flicker to the glass of beer, and she has the sudden fear of being poisoned, or drugged. She thinks about the Weevil again, how easily it had torn into the porter like he was nothing. How easy would it be for it to kill her if that’s what Jack decided would happen to her?  
Jack must notice her change in demeanour because his smile turns patronising instead. “Don’t be so dramatic. Whatever you’re thinking, it isn’t that bad. It’s an amnesia pill. We call it Retcon. My own recipe, but it was initially created by an avatar of The Eye that used to work for us. By tomorrow morning you’ll have forgotten all about Torchwood, and all about me. And I think that’s the truly tragic part in all of this, don’t you?”  
Jack turns to watch Gwen as she shoves past him and he sighs to himself, reaching for his coat before getting up and following her out into the street. 

“Don’t think you can fight it by staying awake, I mixed in a little sedative as well.” It’s partly a brag and partly a warning, he doesn’t want her falling into traffic or getting herself into more trouble if she tries to run.  
“Then I’ll tell someone.” She sounds desperate, and Jack can tell that she’s already flagging a little. That means she’s still mostly human if not fully, she can’t have been claimed all that long ago. He doesn’t want to have to kill her if there’s a chance that she could prove useful in the future, and she doesn’t seem to have any drive to end the world, which is always a bonus when dealing with avatars.  
“Really?” He says, and he almost sounds disappointed. He is. He thought she’d know better than that. “Do you want us to come after them too?”  
He watches the shock form on her face, replaced by realisation and a heavy sort of defeat. “You bastard.”  
He salutes somewhat mockingly, grinning again. “Language! Nice knowing you, Gwen Cooper.”  
He stands outside of the pub, his hands by his sides, and watches as she disappears off into the Cardiff night. 

\---------------------------------------------

Owen is lying on his bed and staring up at his ceiling when he feels it. He doesn’t know what it is at first, and that isn’t exactly reassuring. It’s a fuzzy feeling in his head, a strange sort of heaviness like he’s hungover and waking from a long nap. What’s weird is that he doesn’t immediately associate it with a person, which is what he tends to do. It’s a gut instinct usually, he can just tell that the feeling or pain is coming from Tosh or Suzie - but never Jack, he never seems to feel Jack’s pain - but this isn’t something he can easily recognise as belonging to either of them. There’s no reason that it couldn’t have come from Jack, he supposes. That would at least explain why it isn’t a familiar sensation to him. But Jack isn’t doing anything that would make Owen feel like this. It isn’t the sensation of being drunk, he doesn’t feel that. It’s usually only pain that he feels. Physical and sometimes emotional if it's strong enough, but feelings like hunger, exhaustion, intoxication don’t usually appear on his radar, and Jack doesn’t drink anyway. He sits up, wondering if he’s just so used to feeling other people’s pain that he’s started to become desensitised to his own, when it hits him.  
It’s Gwen’s.  
He reaches for his phone, hurrying to call Tosh as if she’ll be able to do something with his revelation. He doesn’t even know if she’s still awake, and by morning it’ll be far too late if it isn’t already. Why he doesn’t call Jack instead he isn’t entirely sure, but some part of him tells him that Tosh will know what to do. She always knows what to do. Knowing is what she does. It’s who she is. The day that Tosh doesn’t know what to do is the day that Owen knows they’re in trouble.  
She answers him on the third ring, asking if everything’s okay. It’s quiet on her end of the line so he knows that she’s at home, but it doesn’t sound like he’s woken her, which is a good start.  
“Jack just retconned Gwen.”  
There’s the sound of shuffling as Tosh moves around, possibly sitting up, and he immediately feels guilty. It is late. “That was the plan, Owen.”  
Owen makes a frustrated noise, trying to work out how to make her understand him. “No, I know. But I know that he’s just done it. I felt it. I can feel it now.”  
Tosh lets out a soft breath, a laugh somewhere between disbelieving and surprised. “You felt it?”  
“I felt it. Already. You know what this means, Tosh? Do you have any idea what this means, that I can feel her pain already? That there is this level of connection already?”  
“It means that she’s far more powerful than we thought.” Tosh answers, her voice taking on a sharper edge suddenly. “Owen, we have to tell Jack about this. She might be dangerous, if she’s that powerful and she doesn’t know what she’s doing, then regardless of who she serves she could bring the entire city crashing down without meaning to.”  
“And he’s just retconned her and sent her off into the deep dark night.” Owen mutters, watching the silent but bright city through his bedroom windows.  
“Pretty much.”  
“Well, shit.” 

\-------------------------------------------------

Gwen wakes up at her desk in the corner of her living room, head on her arms. The computer is powered down, which is odd because she doesn’t remember turning it off. She reaches forward and jiggles the mouse to see if it’s simply gone into sleep mode, but it’s well and truly switched off. She frowns at it as Rhys touches her shoulder, putting a mug of coffee down on the stack of paper next to her elbow. “Did you get pissed?”  
His voice is gentle, more teasing than disapproving, and Gwen shakes her head, pushing herself upright.  
“No. What time is it?”  
There’s a moment of silence as Rhys checks, Gwen holding her breath with anticipation. She doesn’t feel hungover, but she has no idea what she was doing last night, so that isn’t exactly a good sign, and being late to work is more than she wants to deal with right now. “Seven thirty. I thought you were working last night.”  
That sentence sparks something in her head, and Gwen nods suddenly. “I was.”  
“Then how come you fell asleep in here?”  
Gwen gestures at the powered down computer a little too defensively, though she’s not sure why, and turns in her seat to look at Rhys properly. “I was typing. That is work.”  
He nods behind his coffee mug as he turns and walks back over to the sofa, that nod that would seem dismissive to somebody that doesnt know him better. “I’m not having a go, love. I’m just saying. Not exactly the brightest idea, was it? I hope you didn’t drive in that state. If I knew you were going out I’d have waited for you, picked you up. Who were you with, Diane?”  
Gwen tries to think back but she can’t quite remember so she just shrugs, knowing that’s the most likely option. “Must’ve been, yeah.”  
“Alright, well, go on, get ready for work then.” Rhys says, and Gwen nods, pushing herself up out of her seat and looking back over at the computer with a frown. She must have been doing something on it last night to have fallen asleep sitting there, but she can’t remember what it was nor think what it might have been. 

She’s still trying to remember when she enters the police station, so focused on running yesterday over in her mind that she almost walks straight into Yvonne, who’s coming in the opposite direction.  
“Did you find him? That Captain Jack Harkness?”  
The question shakes Gwen from her thoughts so abruptly that it barely even registers and she stares blankly for a moment. Captain Jack Harkness. It’s not a name that she recognises, and if it wasn’t for the fact that Yvonne was clearly expecting an answer from her, she’d have assumed she was talking to somebody else.  
“How do you mean? Who’s he?”  
Yvonne carries on past her, shaking her head. “Oh, well, don’t worry about me. Just go ahead, wasting my time.”  
Gwen frowns, watching Yvonne walk out of sight. Captain Jack Harkness? Even if she thinks about it, that’s not a name she can ever recall having heard before. She doesn’t think it’s relevant to the murder of John Tucker at least, so she has no idea why she’d have been asking Yvonne about him, whoever he is.  
She’s still thinking about it when Temple tries to talk to her later, trying to slot this Captain Jack Harkness into the events of last night, which is tricky when she remembers nothing about either him or it. She knows that two days ago was the date that she was supposed to remember, the date that she’d thought something special was going to happen. Evidently it hadn’t. She hadn’t met an alien or travelled through time or won the lottery or whatever she’d assumed would happen, which she finds slightly disappointing but doesn’t have time to dwell on because her attention is drawn to an image on the board at the front of the room.  
“That the murder weapon?”  
Temple nods, and then starts launching into an explanation about how they got the visual for it. Something to do measuring the wound and calculating the shape and length of the blade, but Gwen already isn’t paying attention again.  
“Nasty looking beast though.” He says, and Gwen focuses again, humming her agreement. It is. A long curved blade, with a secondary and tertiary blade poking out on either side, a small distance apart from each other. It’s definitely unusual, not something she’s seen before, or even anything close to it.  
Temple echoes her sentiment. “There can’t be that many of them. Sort of ornamental.”  
Gwen thinks about suggesting that it might be custom made, that there might only be one of them created by the murderer specifically for the crime, in which case she doesn’t know what good trying to track it will do. But she doesn’t. Partly because it’s likely they’ve already considered that possibility and partly because it seems a little far-fetched for her. There is more of a chance of it being some sort of rare collectors objects from some obscure historical battle she knows nothing about, in which case tracing it would be exactly the right thing to do. 

So now she has three things bouncing around in her head, what happened last night, who Captain Jack Harkness might be, and the origins of that weird weapon. Granted, the latter of those three is less of an issue for her personally to resolve, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t thinking about it.  
She thinks about it on her lunch with Andy, when they’re sat in the patrol car with the windows steaming up and the radio turned right the way down. He’s talking about something, some conversation that he either was part of or just happened to overhear, Gwen isn’t paying enough attention to tell and she’s not going to curb his enthusiasm by asking him to repeat it all because she wasn’t listening to him.  
There’s every chance that Andy knows she isn’t listening, that he’s just talking to fill the silence. She wouldn’t put it past him, he’s that sort of person. Doesn’t always like the sound of his own voice but can’t stand silence. It’s good background noise at least, sounding close enough to white noise that she can block it out easily enough. He doesn’t ask questions, which she’s grateful for, because she wouldn’t know where to start if he actually wanted them answering.  
She thinks about it at home with Rhys that night, he’s talking about his day and she’s thinking about Captain Jack Harkness and that weapon and the missing chunk of her memory and then back to the weapon and then to Jack again. She’s listening to Rhys more than she was Andy, he talks too much drivel for her to pay attention to him when she’s trying to, but she still wouldn’t be able to tell Rhys what he was talking about if he asked her. Which, mercifully, he doesn’t. Though he’d likely be a little more understanding than Andy, who seems to have diverged into completely uncharted waters in terms of their relationship over the last few days. What she’s done to annoy him, she can’t imagine, but she already knows that it won’t last long. Andy’s never managed to be mad at her for more than three days in the entire time that they’ve known each other, and she doesn’t see that changing anytime soon.  
She thinks about it at two in the morning, when she’s lying in bed staring at the clock because her thoughts won’t stop whirling. They’re going in circles at this point and she knows it, but that’s because she doesn’t have anything else to think about. She hasn’t made any earth-shattering discoveries in the last four hours, and she’s starting to get tired of the same three questions, though they clearly aren’t tired of her.  
She sighs, deciding to at least get up and be productive if she can’t sleep, instead of thinking the same three thoughts until they become the only things that she can think. She’s careful not to wake Rhys as she gets up, heading towards the computer desk in the corner of the living room. She reaches for a pencil and piece of paper, finding only an envelope. It doesn’t seem important so it’ll serve her for what she wants. She idly sketches out the murder weapon, just to give her hands something to do. She realises halfway through the sketch that she probably should have tried to focus on something not related to the only three thoughts currently in her head, but it’s too late to stop now.  
She puts the pencil down carefully on a brochure for the Millenium Centre when something catches her eye. Scribbled hastily in pen at the bottom corner of the brochure is a single word in block capitals and what is unmistakably her handwriting despite the fact she has no recollection of writing it - Remember.  
Gwen frowns at it, picking the brochure up carefully. Remember. It’s an aggravatingly vague direction, with no indication of what it is that she’s supposed to be remembering. Does it have any sort of connection to the Millenium Centre or is that just the only thing to write on that she happened to have on hand at the time? It means it’s likely that she was doing something at the computer the other night, even though when she powers it up, there’s nothing. No new google searches, no new documents or photos, nothing at all to indicate that she’d been using it.  
Gwen glances down at the brochure for the Millenium Centre again before looking back towards her bedroom. Rhys won’t be surprised if she’s gone when he wakes up, he’ll probably just assume she went in early for a shift. And even if he doesn’t, he won’t ask questions. Gwen sighs, glancing at her watch. Sure, it’s late, and she’s unlikely to learn anything useful from her outing, but she has that feeling again. That unmistakable pull from deep in her gut returns, but now it’s tinged with something that feels like loneliness, as if she’s mourning for the loss of something she doesn’t even remember having.  
She pushes herself up out of the computer chair and sighs, taking a last look at the Millenium Centre brochure.  
Remember.  
She certainly intends to.  
\--------------------------------------------  
It’s cold but not raining when she gets to the Millenium Centre, and she’s grateful for that, hugging her leather jacket closer to her. It’s the only jacket she could find without risking waking Rhys, and it’s not doing a perfect job but it’s better than nothing. She looks from the Millenium Centre to the water tower and back again, unsure exactly what it is that she’s waiting for. She wants to remember, but she’s not sure to do it.  
There are footsteps from a little way in front of her and she looks up, meeting two pure black eyes. She almost takes a step back, so surprised is she. It’s a woman, maybe around a few years older than she is. Gwen can’t see her properly through the dark of the early morning, but there’s something familiar about her. She feels that pull again and steps forwards, a rush of something she can’t place coursing through her, like her veins are full of static electricity. The woman smiles, tilts her head back, and something slots into place. The blade. She remembers the blade.  
“Hello again,” the woman says, and her voice makes Gwen take another step back. She knows her too. She’s sure she does but she can’t think from where. “You told Jack we should liaise with the police. I was the only one who bothered. So I was the only one who saw the report.”  
Gwen watches as she takes something out of her bag. It’s hard to tell what it is at first until it catches one of the streetlights, the glow reflecting off the water tower. It’s the blade.  
Gwen tries to think of something to say, something to do, but that tugging sensation is returning, overpowering the shock and the fear, drawing her in. “How do I know you?”  
“I thought you might have seen it.” The woman continues like Gwen hasn’t even spoken, studying the blade in her hand. “And that can be enough to override the amnesia, just one specific image, sometimes. He said you had potential. But you’re an End avatar, like me. And I’m not willing to be replaced.”  
The woman - Gwen thinks her name might be starting to come back to her - puts the blade back into the bag slung over her arm, rummaging around for something else. “Er, hold on. Sorry.”  
Gwen looks away for a moment, closing her eyes and trying to think, and when she opens them again Suzie - that’s her name, Suzie - is holding a gun, and Gwen is staring straight down the barrel.  
“There, that’s better.” Suzie’s sleeves are rolled up, and Gwen can see the dark patches of skin where her long twisting tattoos snake up her body. They’re visible under her collar too, and Gwen can’t remember if that’s how they were earlier or not. Not that that’s exactly her most pressing concern right now.  
“Put it down.” She’s surprised at how calm her voice sounds, how level she can appear when her mind is screaming at her.  
“You had to come back, didn’t you? Couldn’t leave well enough alone. And now I have to deal with you.” Suzie adjusts the gun in her hand, and Gwen’s eyes track it as it wavers.  
“Put down the gun.” From the little she can remember well enough to piece things together, Suzie was the one who killed John Tucker, and most likely the two before that. Gwen highly doubts she’d hesitate to kill her. Temple had said the killer would have attacked from behind because they were a coward, and Gwen hopes that being able to look Suzie in the eyes makes it a little harder for her to pull the trigger.  
“You're the only one who can make the link.” Suzie says, her jaw tightening for a moment. “Well, the only one in public. The others are going to catch on by morning, but I'll be long gone by then. I don’t know where, somewhere far away.” Gwen catches a flash of realisation as it crosses Suzie’s face, taking her eyes away from the gun for a moment. “What am I going to do? I loved this job. I really loved it. Being with people like me, learning and growing and being taught that I’m not a monster. There’s nowhere else I can go, nowhere like this, nowhere in the world. This was my home. And you’ve taken that from me.”  
“Please, just put down the gun.” Gwen’s voice starts to tremble. She wants to move, to do something, but she’s still being drawn in, rooted to the spot by some insatiable desire to be near to whatever this is, to be one with it. 

“Because it gets inside of you.” Suzie seems to be talking to herself now, the gun still clutched in a too tight grip, shaking in her hand. “You do this job for long enough, and it changes you. Being around other avatars forces your own evolution onwards, in ways that you don’t even realise. And it changes you. But you see so much shit. So much fear, entities that don’t align with your own, and it makes you think, I mean really think, about everything. I serve the oldest god, the most powerful. All things come to me, some just sooner than others. And I’m afraid, Gwen Cooper, that you’ll be coming sooner than most.”  
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Gwen says, almost having to force the words out. And she means it. None of this means anything to her, she doesn’t think it ever did.  
“You will soon. You had it so easy, you didn’t have to come back. I wish I could forget.”  
“Why did you kill those people?”  
Suzie looks back at Gwen, almost as if she’s seeing her for the first time. “For the glove. I needed the bodies. Didn’t Jack explain this to you? That’s my lifeblood. I needed the practise. And it was easy. In using the glove, I'd position myself behind the head, so they'd never see me twice.”  
Gwen’s blood runs cold. Not a coward, then. Just clever. Suzie would have no issues looking her in the eye as she takes her life, she realises that now. Suddenly she feels a lot less protected, out here all on her own.  
“You killed three people.” That’s the part she doesn’t understand. If they’re already dead then maybe it isn’t as bad to practise on them, but killing them in the first place, she doesn’t understand how she could do that.  
“It was the only way. The more I use the glove, the more I control it, the stronger I get. I’m almost a Stage Four. The last six years of my life with Torchwood have been building up to that moment, don’t you see it? This is everything to me. And you took it.”  
“I don't understand. What glove? Where have I seen you before?” Gwen can feel something building inside of her. It isn’t fear, and that surprises her. It’s a strange sensation, like she’s on the verge of something, like she can feel the other shoe preparing to drop and she’s just waiting for it.  
“If I can reach Stage Four, then think what the glove could do. If I could really control my power, get it to work all of the time, permanently. Resurrection for the whole world. I know what you’re thinking, surely that’s the opposite of what I want. But what if I learn to take it away as well? Build it up and then wipe them out, entire cities at once. I could make myself immortal, ruler of the undead. I could be a god. The others don’t understand. Owen’s too scared to better himself, Tosh knows what she wants but she’s not confident enough to reach it just yet. They go swanning around, doing whatever they want. They stop avatars, like they’re supposed to. But they don’t want to develop. See, the way it works is that you've got to get inside this stuff. Surrender yourself to it, ignore the fear and understand this is the path you have been chosen for. I did it, with the knife and the glove, and that's why the perception filter isn't going to work on me.”  
Gwen wants to ask what she means but Suzie points the gun to her left, pulling the trigger without even looking to see where she’s aiming. Gwen watches for a second, and then somebody appears from nowhere. They fall forwards, crumpling to the ground between her and Suzie, a hole in the centre of their forehead. It’s a man, somebody else her brain tells her she should recognise but she doesn’t. “What? Who’s-? Where did he come from? What have you done?”  
Suzie steps over him in a single stride, nudging his hand out of her path with her foot. The gun in her hand is trained back on Gwen, who glances from it to the man on the floor and back. Now she knows for sure that Suzie won't hesitate to kill her, and she starts to panic. “Please, don’t.”  
“I’ve got to.” Suzie says, though she sounds a little less sure now. “I can’t let you go.”  
Gwen tries to tell her that letting her go won't make any difference now, but all she can do is plead.  
“I’ve got to. I’m sorry. I’ve got to.” Suzie’s still repeating it, but her grip on the gun is unsteady. There’s no emotion in her eyes that she can make out, but Gwen hopes it’s a sign that she’s reconsidering again. She closes her eyes and turns her head away, bringing her arms closer to her chest in anticipation of something, even if she isn’t entirely sure what.  
“Put down the gun.”  
Gwen’s eyes open again, and they widen as she looks back up and takes in the scene in front of her. The dead man is no longer lying on the stones, he’s standing behind Suzie, his arms folded across his chest. The wound in the centre of his forehead closes as Gwen watches it, and she takes a step backwards, her arms still wrapped around herself. Suzie turns at the sound of his voice, seemingly as startled as Gwen is by the fact he isn’t actually dead, whoever he is.  
“Jack-” She tries, her voice breaking a little. Gwen watches her lower the gun, shoulders slumping in defeat, but she doesn’t let go of it.  
“It’s over, Suzie.” Jack says, holding his hand out for the gun. His voice is gentle, upset. He almost sounds fond. His expression seems to convey that he is. His eyes are soft and guilty, like he thinks he’s let her down. Like this isn’t her fault, somehow. Like it’s his. “Just come with me.”  
Suzie brings the hand holding the gun back up, in a movement so quick and sharp that Gwen barely has time to close her eyes before the shot rings out. Her legs give way beneath her, hands managing to catch herself. She curls up, hugging herself tightly, pressing her head to her knees and letting out a sob into her jeans. She remembers. John Tucker and the gauntlet and the Weevil. Owen and Tosh and Suzie and the conversation in the pub with Jack. She remembers all of it. 

Jack looks down at Suzie’s body, sighing to himself. She’s made his job easier, in a way. At least now he doesn’t have to kill her himself. He thinks that might have been harder to do than watch her kill herself. She’s barely been dead for thirty seconds when Jack feels his phone vibrating in the pocket of his coat. He digs it out, giving it enough of a cursory glance over to make sure the screen hasn’t cracked but not enough to read the contact name that flashes on the screen. “Jack Harkness.”  
“Suzie.” Owen’s voice is breathless and strained, and Jack wonders if the pain woke him up. He’s already out of bed and heading for the door by the footsteps Jack can hear. He hears Owen swallow, choking on his words through a haze of panic as he tries to tell Jack something that he already knows. “Suzie, Jack. It’s Suzie.”  
Jack nods though Owen can’t see him, and then sighs. “Suzie’s dead, Owen.”  
The sound of footsteps through the phone stops abruptly and there’s a split-second of silence before Jack hears the thud of Owen sitting down heavily, whether it’s on his chair or his bed or maybe the floor. “What?”  
Jack looks back up at Gwen, who’s still kneeling on the cobbles and hugging herself, the wind whipping her hair around her face. “She’s dead.”  
There’s just the sound of shaky breathing for a long moment, followed by what might be the start of a choked sob, and then Owen hangs up.  
Jack puts the phone back into his pocket, stepping around Suzie’s body as carefully as he can without looking at it for too long. He assumes Owen will call Tosh, that they’ll both be here before the hour. If not, it doesn’t really matter. They’ll be here soon enough anyway. This isn’t a conversation he wants to have with them but it’s the unfortunate reality of what they do, and this proves that.  
He crouches down next to Gwen somewhat awkwardly, laying his hand on her shoulder and squeezing it lightly.  
She raises her head, turning teary eyes to look at him behind a curtain of swinging hair, that one white stripe still as clear as day. “I remember now.”  
Jack nods, shifting a little to let her stand, being sure to block Suzie’s body from her field of vision in the process. “Gwen Cooper,” is all he says, his voice more breath than words as he offers her his hand. “We’ve got a long night ahead of us.”


	2. Everything Changes (Extra)

The sound of whirring draws Gwen’s attention and she sits up a little, raising her head off of Owen’s desk to look in the direction of the sound. The cog door rolls back and Owen walks though into the main cavern of the Hub, his hands in his pockets. Jack sighs softly from where he’s standing against the wall behind her as if he suspects what’s coming, and crosses the room, leaning down to Gwen to mutter something in her ear.  
“Be gentle with him. He’s always a bit tetchy after we lose one.”  
Gwen half wonders how many people they’ve lost, how many times they’ve had to have this conversation. Something tells her it’s quite a lot.  
Owen’s footsteps echo as he ascends the three small steps to his workspace, slouching like an angsty teenager and coming to a stop in front of Gwen.  
“Move.” He’s shuffling from foot to foot like an impatient toddler, springing on his toes as though he’s full of pent-up anxious energy. “You’re sitting in my seat.”  
Gwen considers arguing with him, telling him that who’s sitting in his chair is the least of his worries right now, that there are bigger issues, but then she looks up at him properly. His jacket is unzipped and thrown over a vest, his jogging bottoms are rumpled and his feet bare in his shoes. His eyes are bleary with what she would have assumed to be the remnants of sleep if the redness around them hadn’t been a clear indication he’d been crying on the drive over. She thinks it over for a moment, remembering what Jack said, and then she gets up without a word, letting him drop heavily into his chair, which spins in a lazy half-circle under his weight.  
“What happened?” His voice is thick and he’s shaking slightly as he rests his elbows on the surface of his desk.  
“Wait until Tosh gets here,” is Jack’s only answer, and Owen makes a soft noise of frustration, pushing his hands through his hair, which is already sticking up far beyond what it was earlier.  
“I just want to know what happened - how it happened.”  
“She was shot.” Jack says, folding his arms across his chest and gesturing for Gwen to sit down on the sofa next to him, which she does silently. Jack doesn’t elaborate on it any more than that, and Owen can’t tell if that’s a good thing or not.  
“Why’s she here?” Owen doesn’t look at Gwen as he speaks, but his voice makes it clear that he’s not happy about her presence.  
“You were the one who called me to say that she was dangerous.”  
Owen lets out a broken sounding laugh. “I don’t want your riddles Jack, you never said you were bringing her back into it. You retconned her. She was out of the picture.”  
“And now she’s back into it.”  
“And what exactly-” Owen wheels around in his chair to speak to Gwen but is cut off by the sound of whirring as the cog door rolls back once more. Gwen glances across as Tosh enters, not missing the way that her eyes skip over Suzie’s desk as she scans the room, looking straight at them instead. 

She walks up towards them, and Gwen watches her as she does so. The eyes clustered in the centre of her forehead are lazy and half-closed, almost like they’re still asleep. Her own eyes are bright though, bright and alive with a strange curiosity. There’s a sort of tension to her, which Gwen supposes is understandable given the circumstances, but she doesn’t seem all that visibly upset by the knowledge that one of her friends is dead.  
Tosh sits down at her desk and draws her chair closer to Owen, who gives her what Gwen can only assume is an attempt at a comforting glance, though it’s muddied somewhat by his own rather obvious lack of composure. The sickly grey colour that his skin was before has given way to a bloodless shade of white, though his eyes are bloodshot and rimmed with red. It only makes him look more like a corpse, Gwen thinks, and then shudders. She’s seen enough today to know.  
“What happened?” Tosh’s voice is barely above a whisper, as if she thinks that speaking up will shatter the illusion of calm that has fallen over them all. Both her and Owen seem so different now from the lively characters they’d been before. Gwen can tell that this has shaken them both, even if they don’t want to show it.  
“She shot herself.” Jack says it the only way he can. He knows how they’ll react, that Tosh will have jumped to the immediate assumption they’re under attack and that Owen will probably have suspected this from the moment he felt it.  
Gwen watches the tension melt out of Tosh, her fists uncurling and her head lowering a little in obvious relief, which confuses her. Owen, on the other hand, just winds up tighter, bracing his elbows on his knees and leaning into it, his head falling into his hands.  
“Obviously, we need to work out how best to move on from here.” Jack says, scanning the occupants of the small space. “Her body is already in storage, her possessions will be seized at some point before the weekend.”  
“What about her research?” Tosh asks, glancing back over towards Suzie’s desk. It seems to Gwen that she’s mourning whatever Suzie was working on more than Suzie herself, and her stomach twists in anger.  
Jack looks down at Gwen, laying a hand on her shoulder. “It’ll be transferred to Gwen, effective immediately. She’ll pick up where Suzie left off, or as close as she can get. It’ll take her some time to build her way up but she’ll get there.”  
Tosh’s eyes widen in intrigue and she looks at Gwen, a small smile forming. “She’s an End avatar?”  
Owen stands suddenly, kicking his chair out from underneath himself and knocking it over, the wheels spinning in the empty air. “Bollocks.”  
“Owen.” Jack’s tone is warning but tired, and Gwen assumes this sort of outburst is common from him. 

Owen spins on his heel to look at Jack, an arm outstretched. “No. I’m sorry Jack, but that’s bollocks. Suzie wouldn’t just do that. She wouldn’t.”  
“I was there, Owen. I know what I saw.”  
“Okay.” Owen nods. “Okay, I’ll play along. So, Suzie just so happens to kill herself a few days after we meet a new avatar. A new End avatar. Who just so happens to be incredibly powerful even at a Stage One level. And you don’t think there’s anything weird about that at all?”  
“She gave into her desire, Owen. It happens. Avatars lose control of their humanity everyday. This was the better option, if she hadn’t eliminated herself then we’d have had to do it eventually anyway. We’re lucky the number of casualties was so low, we could have been looking at a city-wide disaster if she’d carried on unchecked.”  
“Lucky?” Owen’s voice cracks. “One of our own is dead and you have the audacity to say that we got lucky?”  
“There was nothing we could have done for her, Owen. The quicker you accept that, the quicker you’ll move on. She got what she wanted.”  
Owen sets his chair upright, sitting back down. He seems a little more settled for his outburst, though he doesn’t look up at them. “Your coffee’s gone bad. Sorry, Tosh.”  
Tosh glances at the polystyrene cup and then nods, offering Owen a reassuring smile that he doesn’t see. “It was cold anyway.”  
Jack surveys the three of them. “Go home, Owen, I know you’ll need the rest of today off. I’ll see you first thing tomorrow morning though, and I expect you to have moved on by then. You two, stay a little bit longer if you don’t mind.”  
Owen gets up, gathering his coat around him. Tosh lays her hand on his arm as he passes and he shakes her off, not looking back as he leaves.

Gwen stares at the empty space where he’d been standing even after he’s gone, brow furrowed.  
“What are you thinking, Gwen Cooper?” Jack sits down at Owen’s desk, crossing his legs and watching her with interest.  
“He cares. Why? You two don’t seem to.”  
“He’s a Corruption avatar. Before that he was a doctor. His gift is that he feels the pain of others. All avatars can sense those that exist under their entity, but the very existence of Corruption avatars revolves around their desire to love something so wholly that they become one with it. So they latch onto others. All avatars form connections as a result of being in close proximity to other avatars, some just do it more strongly than others, and connections formed by a Corruption avatar are the strongest. None of us are particularly close to each other, but those connections exist naturally. A part of Owen was torn out of him the second Suzie pulled that trigger. The connection that Tosh and I had with her lacks that strength, that’s all.”  
Gwen looks between Jack and Tosh. “Does that mean Owen is tied to every avatar in history?”  
“Not quite. The strength of the connection is an indication of the potential an avatar has, but it’s not an exact science. Connections also develop as avatars relationships develop. I try to discourage them from getting too emotionally close to each other for exactly this reason. Distance is important. Owen’s weakness is that he cares too much about others.” Jack smiles at her. “I know it’s a lot to take in. We try not to unload it all onto new avatars at once, it can be disorienting. We found you in unfortunate circumstances, that’s all. But you’ll catch on soon enough. Once Owen’s tantrum has passed and we’re back to business, it’ll start to make sense.” 

“Tantrum?” Gwen echoes, a little shocked at Jack’s flippancy. “Jack, someone that he cared about is dead, he’s allowed to be upset.”  
Jacks sighs, sitting forwards on Owen’s chair. “You just don’t get it, do you? It’s superficial, what he’s feeling. He’s mourning the part of himself that Suzie took with her, not her. You mourn for civilians but not for other avatars. We’re not human, there’s nothing to mourn. He’s had no issue with killing avatars in the past, just because this one happened to be somebody that he knew he thinks it’s different for him.”  
He stands up from Owen’s desk, stretching a little. “There are four stages to avatarship. Stage One, where you are now. Stage Two, where secondary changes develop. Stage Three, the stage where you acquire your revelation and learn to control your abilities. And finally, Stage Four, when an avatar gains immortality and devotes themselves fully to their entity. Our job is to stop avatars from hitting Stage Four by killing them when they surface to avoid the completion of any rituals. You’ll start tomorrow, I think that’s all you need to know for now. Toshiko, you can head home. Gwen Cooper, with me.” Jack turns on his heel, marching down the steps into the main section of the Hub, his coat trailing behind him.  
Gwen stands as well, making to follow him when Tosh’s voice stops her, makes her turn back for a second.  
“He likes to think of us as emotionless beings, but Suzie’s deaths bothering him more than he’s letting on.”  
\-------------------------------------------------------------------  
Jack and Gwen stand on the roof of the Millenium Centre, watching the sun as it starts to rise over Cardiff. The morning air is cold, and Gwen hugs herself tightly. It’s a nice view, if you ignore the fact she’s looking right down at the spot where Suzie Costello died only a few hours before.  
“Owen and Toshiko-” she says it like it’s a question, and Jack wonders what she’s going to ask, and if he’ll be able to answer her, “-you didn’t tell them Suzie shot you in the head.”  
Jack looks down at her. “And neither did you. You followed my lead, keep doing that and you just might find that you get through this in one piece.”  
“But she killed you.”  
“I can’t die.” Jack says simply. “I reached Stage Four a long while back. Not of my own choice, I was barely even Stage Two when it happened. I don’t have any real abilities as a result but we manage.”  
“And you haven’t told the others?”  
“I've taught them that Stage Four avatars are the ultimate threat, that they have no humanity left and believe in nothing but destruction, and that’s not strictly true - I don’t have a crushing desire to end the world, I’m too fond of humanity for that.” Jack watches Cardiff as it wakes, and Gwen almost believes that. That he’d defend humanity with everything that he has.  
“Then tell them that. Explain.”  
“And make them doubt whether killing is the right thing to do? Make them question if every avatar is inherently evil?” Jack looks down at her for a moment and then shakes his head. “No, I’d rather not risk the destruction of earth because one of them decides to spare an avatar on the off chance they’d be able to resist the temptation. What happened to Suzie has proved that it’s hard to fight off the influences, I’m hoping it’ll be a good lesson for them both.”  
“And the innocent ones that are killed in the process?” Gwen can’t hide the edge that her voice has taken.  
“Are a necessary sacrifice for the good of the future. There are many things in this world you can’t change Gwen Cooper, but very few that you can’t make something useful out of if you look hard enough. The twenty-first century is when everything changes. And we need to be ready.”


	3. Day One

“Gwen?”  
Gwen looks away from her blank monitor at the sound of the voice coming off from somewhere behind her, twisting in her chair. She’s not entirely sure why she’s been staring at a blank monitor for the last however long it's been, if she’s honest. Jack called her in for something and then promptly disappeared, and Owen is yet to make his first appearance of the day, so somebody calling her name is a more than welcome distraction. However, the only other person in the main section of the Hub is Tosh, and she appears to be sitting at her desk deeply absorbed in whatever is occurring on one of her many, many busy monitors. Gwen frowns a little, and goes to turn her attention back to her own, unfortunately dataless, computer, shaking her head to herself.  
“Gwen.” This time she’s quick enough to spot Tosh’s beckoning hand before she turns back around, and after a moment she stands up, walking the short distance across the Hub to the other desk.  
“Yeah?”  
Tosh wordlessly indicates that she pull up Owen’s chair and scoots her own across a little, making room for Gwen in front of the array of monitors and keyboards and computer mice, the surface of the desk a trailing mess of wires and chaos. Gwen sits carefully, looking first at the screens and then at Tosh, a little unsure what she’s doing here.  
Tosh turns her gaze to Gwen for a moment and smiles. It’s unsure and a little nervous, and Gwen supposes she can’t blame her. Not that she can even begin to understand everything that’s gone on in the last few days, but still, Gwen appreciates the circumstances that Tosh and Owen are in here. One of their closest friends is dead and they’re expected to just accept it, she’s replaced without hesitation and Jack doesn’t so much as bat an eye at the loss.  
Tosh clears her throat and tries to smile a little more convincingly, looking back at the monitors. “I know that Jack prefers the drop-you-in-at-the-deep-end-and-make-you-figure-it-out-alone approach, but I find that it helps to at least have the vaguest idea of what you’re getting yourself into.”  
She clicks something on her keyboard and a map pops up, a page of lines and shadows and shapes. Dots litter the page at irregular intervals, some further apart and some clustered together, some bigger and some so small they can barely be seen. “This is Cardiff, or at least, a section of it. These dots-” Tosh reaches out and touches the screen lightly “-are avatars. We use this to keep track of them. How many there are, how powerful they are. The bigger the dot, the stronger they are. They’re all colour coded.” She taps something else on her keyboard and a small key appears at the side of the screen.  
“All of these dots are avatars?” Gwen asks. There aren’t that many of them, not considering how populated Cardiff is, but still more than she’d have expected considering that she’s gone her entire life without knowing that they existed.  
Tosh nods. “They’re not all active though. Meaning, some of them don’t know that they’re avatars. Maybe they never will.”  
“How does it work then? Being an avatar?”  
“We don’t really know. We used to think certain people were just born with the potential and circumstances brought it out, but after Torchwood One fell and we learnt what was going on there, it seems like even if people aren’t born with the potential, it’s possible to force avatarship onto them.”  
Gwen nods. “And this is how you keep track of them all?”  
“Yep. Avatarship changes a person's genetic makeup, they become less and less human as their power grows. Jack explained that to you, right? It’s why avatars have to be killed before they reach Stage Four. So, each entity gives off a different frequency, of sorts. No two avatars of an entity are the same, but all avatars of a certain entity have a certain basic makeup that identifies them as belonging to that entity. It’s helpful for telling us which entities are getting stronger, which rituals we might need to prepare for soon. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing.”  
Gwen nods, watching the screen and frowning. “That’s the Hub right?”  
Tosh looks at where she’s pointing. “Yep.”  
“So why aren’t we on there?”  
“Good question. Jack’s inputted our specific signals into the system so that we don’t appear, otherwise it could get confusing if we’re registering as potential threats when we’re moving around the city.”  
Gwen sits back in her chair. “Right. So, what, you periodically check up on every signal that registers?”  
“Not really. We have an alert system. Anytime an avatar uses their abilities, their signal spikes and that flags up on the system, triggering an alarm. Then we head out, assess the situation, see what action needs to be taken. We also have a separate system for Weevils, just because of the sheer number of them there are, the alerts would be going off constantly if we had them on the same system.”  
Gwen looks across at Tosh, impressed. “You set this all up yourself? You certainly seem to be in charge of it all.”  
Tosh shrugs. “I update the systems every now and then, that sort of thing. The Torchwood Institute has been around since the late 1800s, so most reports and methods of tracking were handwritten, and later converted to typewriter. Now, we digitise them all, and that’s one of my jobs here, digitise old reports and keep everything electronic all nice and organised. I think we have about six empty filing cabinets in the archives because everything on them is electronic now. And it’s helpful, because more and more avatars are popping up these days. Although, not everything can be nice and neatly organised. Take, for example-” Tosh swings her chair around, pointing towards the centre of the room.  
Gwen follows her gaze - she’s pointing to the big machine in the middle of the cavern, that daunting mass of cabling and metal that seems to stretch on forever.  
“-the Rift Manipulator.”  
“The what?” Gwen asks, looking back at Tosh.  
Tosh glances at her, eyes narrowing. “Jack didn’t tell you about it? About the Rift?”  
Gwen shakes her head. “No, he never mentioned it. Not that I remember, anyway.”  
Tosh sighs, clearly annoyed, and then shakes her head a little. “The Rift is a doorway in space and time, it runs along most major fault lines and occasionally branches off into smaller ley lines. It’s pretty much everywhere. One of the entities, The Vast, all of it’s avatars have the ability to control The Rift. They can step through time and space, open the door and close it behind them again.”  
“The Vast is the fear of…?”  
“Open spaces, heights, falling, the insignificance of our place in the universe, the sky, storms, that sort of thing. We don’t know where most entities' territories directly start and end, but anything to do with the sky, space, time, that’s usually Vast domain.” Tosh glances at Gwen again, as if making sure she’s absorbing all of this. “You’ll catch on eventually, give it time. Anyway, Vast avatars can naturally control The Rift, but nobody else can. So, a Vast avatar and an Eye avatar that worked here in the 1940’s worked together and created the Rift Manipulator as a way of allowing all avatars to have some degree of control over The Rift. It’s not as accurate as an actual Vast avatar would be, but if you input the proper numbers and get lucky enough, it typically gives you what you want.”  
Gwen nods. “Is there anything else like that? Any machines that emulate the powers of avatars?”  
Tosh nods. “Plenty. That’s also part of what we do. We don’t just stop avatars, we look for bits of entity technology, see what it does, if it’s a threat. Normally, showing you would be Suzie’s job, but I’ll find time to take you down into the archives and show you around eventual-”  
She’s cut off by a beeping from the monitor in front of her, and Gwen watches her frown and then that frown deepens as she clicks around the screen. There’s a dot slowly working it’s way across the map, pulsing slightly, leaving a trail behind it as it moves.  
“Jack!” Tosh shouts over her shoulder, and then starts typing something. Gwen scoots her chair back, and almost bumps into Jack, who’s appeared behind them suddenly.  
“Everything alright?”  
“Energy signal. It’s too deeply buried to make out which entity it belongs to, but it’s definitely an avatar.”  
“Is it moving?”  
“Descending. It’s altitude is dropping, it’s like it’s landing somewhere.”  
“A plane, maybe?” Gwen suggests. “That would account for the dulled signal, wouldn’t it?”  
“Good thinking, Cooper. Keep an eye on it. If it is a plane, tell them to keep it at the gate, not to let anybody off. Owen’s on his way in, when he gets here we’ll head out, see what we can find.”  
Tosh shakes her head. “I don’t think it’s a plane. It’s trajectory is wrong if it’s coming in to land at an airport. Whatever it is, it’s crashing.”  
“Then Owen better be quick, before somebody else gets to it.” Jack says, and it almost sounds like a threat.  
Tosh looks across at Gwen. “Your first catch as a Torchwood agent. Let’s try and make it an easy one.”  
\-------------------------------------------------------  
“It looks like it’s going to be a simple clean-up operation,” Jack says, addressing the SUV at large. “Tosh’s worked out that the energy signal is coming from a meteorite. That means we most likely won't be dealing with an actual avatar. It’s likely the energy the scanner picked up is just residual, which would explain why it wasn’t strong enough for us to work out who it belongs to.”  
“So, someone up there’s throwing rocks at us?” Owen asks jokingly, his eyes on the road ahead. “Great. My votes on The End. I’m guessing it didn’t like what happened to its best and brightest and now it’s trying to tell us off. Of all the gods to piss off, you had to pick the death one.”  
“We’ll know for definite what it is when we get there.” Jack catches Gwen’s gaze in the rearview mirror and smiles that dazzling smile, but Gwen is more distracted by the monitor in front of Tosh. She’s triangulating the location of the crash site, trying to get a more specific picture than the scanner can give her. She’s also keeping an eye on news outlets, police chatter, trying to work out if anyone else is likely to be getting involved.  
“Is that CrimInt? This is the police computer system.” Gwen looks at Tosh and then at Jack, almost accusatory. “You shouldn’t have this.”  
Jack turns in his chair to face her, tugging at his belt. “You might want to stop saying you and start saying we. You’re just as much a part of this now as the rest of us. Better get used to it.”  
“The crash site is a hundred metres ahead.” Tosh says, leaning towards the centre of the car to get a look through the windshield, and Gwen does the same. Up ahead it’s just trees and a dirt track, though she thinks she can just about see the faint glow of fire beyond. She supposes they’re lucky it didn’t crash somewhere more public, though Jack clearly doesn’t think the same, as he groans softly as they approach.  
“Shit. The amateurs got here first.” Owen mutters, and Jack makes a noise of agreement. The suggestion that it’s Owen’s fault they were delayed doesn’t get spoken aloud, but the glare that Jack is giving him makes it clear enough anyway. The amateurs, as far as Gwen can tell, are the police and the military. Not exactly what she’d class as amateurs, but the others clearly don’t have a high opinion of them.  
Owen parks a little roughly, his frustration evident. “Do us all a favour, Newbie. Hang back a little on this one. Keep your mouth shut, keep your head down. We have enough issues dealing with these guys as it is, without the fact that you barely know what you’re doing.”  
Gwen nods, knowing Owen isn’t in the mood to argue. Jack shakes his head at her the moment Owen exits the car, beckoning her to follow them, as if she ever had any intention of doing otherwise.  
Owen shoots her an aggravated look as he unloads one of the bags from the car, passing it across to her, but he doesn’t say anything to her. Gwen can understand his hostility, she’s replaced one of the people he was closest to. Both Jack and Tosh are acting like everything is fine, even if they don’t feel that way, but Owen has too much resentment for her to do that. She’s willing to give him time. Time to adjust, time to come around. With any luck, it won’t take him too long.  
“Usual formation.” Jack says once they’re all carrying a bag, and then walks off without another word, as if that simple command is supposed to make perfect sense to her. Tosh follows quickly, clearly understanding the vague instruction, leaving her and Owen alone at the car.  
“What’s the usual formation?”  
Owen looks at her out of the corner of his eye as he closes the boot, putting the last of the bags down next to the rear wheel, ignoring the mud. “It varies.” His words are curt, tone clipped, and he walks off without checking to see if she’s following. Gwen sighs gently, watching his back as he walks away. It’s not his fault, she reminds herself. He’s hurting, he’s angry, he’s grieving. She picks up the bag that he’d left behind, hurrying to keep up. 

She stops at the entrance to the army tent, frowning a little before pushing onwards. She has no idea what she’s getting herself into, and it’s equal parts exciting and terrifying. Jack did say it would only be a simple clean up operation, but she’s quickly learning she can’t exactly trust everything he says.  
She pulls back one of the tent flaps and goes to enter, but finds her way barred by a soldier, and takes a quick step backwards, the bag in her hands dropping.  
“Who the hell are you?”  
“Sorry.” Gwen says instinctively, and then frowns at herself. She has more authority here than they do, if what Owen says is anything to go by. She isn’t a subordinate anymore, she’s one of the ones at the top. That’ll take some getting used to.  
“This area’s restricted.”  
Gwen nods. “Yep. Nope. It’s alright. Torchwood. I’m Torchwood.” She gives the bag in her hands a little shake, the contents rattling around. She can already imagine the look on Owen’s face if she gets thrown out of here not even five minutes after arriving, the sarcastic comments, the insufferable little smirk.  
“Don’t mess with me, little girl. You’re not with Torchwood, and even if you were-”  
The other side of the tent twitches, drawing back suddenly as somebody steps through. “You’d have put out the welcome banners.”  
Gwen can’t help but feel the tension drain out of her at the sound of Jack’s voice, that confident, assertive voice. She then feels a twinge of annoyance at herself for being grateful he’s come to her rescue, not much of a good first impression of her in action, not that this is exactly his first impression.  
“Now, first of all, she’s no little girl. From where I’m standing, all the right curves in all the right places.”  
Gwen ducks her head a little, hands tightening around the straps of the back she’s still holding like it’s a lifeline. He’s right, she isn’t a little girl, but what he’s said feels just about as patronising. And he isn’t finished.  
“But she is Torchwood. We both are. And we’d appreciate it if you’d leave us to do the real work. Shall we?” He takes hold of the middle of the strap of Gwen’s bag, practically towing her along behind him, and she has to resist the urge to snatch it back out of his grip.

“When I said hang back Newbie, I didn’t mean quite that much.” Owen’s voice is practically gleeful as he watches Jack lead her down towards the crash site, she can almost picture him rubbing his hands together, the self-satisfied little bastard.  
“Save the comments for later, Owen.” Jack says, finally letting go of the bag strap and indicating where Gwen should put it down. “Now then, let’s see what we came for.”  
It just looks like a big lump of rock to Gwen, nothing supernatural or godly about it. It’s buried into the ground, the pit almost as deep as the meteorite is tall, and she thinks it must have been quite a sight to see it land.  
“So, what do we know about it?”  
Owen looks over his shoulder at Jack. “It’s bog standard space debris.” He shoots a glance at Gwen out of the corner of his eye, and she thinks she sees him smile. “That’s a technical term.”  
“Yeah, thanks.” She isn’t quite willing to let him off that lightly, though clearly he thinks she’s paid her dues.  
“So, take all of the readings and let's get out of here.” Jack says, surveying his team.  
“We’re just going to leave it here?” Gwen asks.  
“Well, it won’t fit in the SUV.” Jack turns around to look at her. “It’s a lump of rock. It’ll be fine. Be a nice little tourist attraction, maybe.”  
“Not like Cardiff needs anymore of those.” Tosh replies from somewhere behind the meteorite, and Jack cracks a smile, nodding in agreement though she can’t see him.  
Gwen just hovers, watching the others as they do whatever it is that they’re doing. She hugs herself, waiting for somebody to give her an instruction. They fall into rhythm so easily, the three of them are so in sync, they know what to do without even having to discuss it. She imagines it was better with Suzie, the four of them in total harmony. She remembers doubting how they could be effective at what they do with such a small team, but she understands it now. 

Eventually, Owen speaks up. “Make yourself useful, Newbie. Pass us the big chisel from the toolbox.” He sticks his hand out at her, waiting.  
“Don’t go stabbing around in there, Owen. Not until we know exactly what it is we’re dealing with.” Jack warns him.  
Owen nods absently but waggles his fingers at her impatiently, and after a moment Gwen picks up the chisel from the toolbox.  
“Catch.”  
She tosses it, and he catches it easily, his fingers curling around it almost protectively. He twists it in his hand, letting it drop by his side as he walks the circumference of the meteorite. Gwen catches a glimpse of his expression for a moment as he passes opposite her, and his face is blank. She goes to ask if he’s okay when he raises his hand mechanically and plunges the chisel handle-deep into the surface of the meteorite before she can even open her mouth. Gwen watches his expression change, momentary confusion replaced quickly by panic, then a flash of intense pain, then an unmistakable look of relief. Jack’s head shoots up at the sound of the chisel meeting rock, and then suddenly he’s next to Owen, dragging him backwards and shouting at her and Tosh to move away.  
Gwen takes a step back, instinctively drawing closer to Tosh as the crack in the rock opens to a fissure that pours out a thick pink gas. Tosh grasps at her sleeve and Gwen stumbles a little over one of the bags, trying to make her way to Jack but somehow unable to take her eyes off of the thing.  
The gas seems to gather together into something that vaguely resembles a figure, and it hovers just above them for a moment before dissipating into the night air. Gwen looks at Tosh and then at Jack and Owen, bewildered.

Jack has a tight grip on the back of Owen’s jacket, holding him up against his shoulder. Owen’s knuckles are white around Jack’s arm, like he’s the only thing keeping him standing. His face has lost the sickly gray colour Gwen’s getting used to seeing him with, he’s as white as he was when he first heard about Suzie’s death. His shoulders heave and Jack lets go of him in disgust, Owen’s knees buckling as he retches and collapses to the muddy ground, hugging himself, his whole body trembling.  
Tosh kneels next to him, touching his shoulder, and Owen takes a shuddering breath, lifting his head up. The grass around him is dead and wilting, everywhere that he touches turning crisp and brown under his body. His eyes are streaming, and they scan the skyline desperately, like he’s looking for something. He takes a second deep shuddering breath, as if he’s gathering the strength to speak, but only a single shaky word gets past his lips. “Shit.”  
\-------------------------------------------------------------  
“What the hell was that?”  
Owen’s partially glad that Jack waited until they got back to the Hub to start throwing around questions, but also he really wishes he’d gotten it over and done with at the scene. Right now he just wants to throw himself into a deep dark pit and sleep for a decade or two. The autopsy table is cold beneath his hands and it soothes him a little, knowing he’s back where he belongs is always a comfort.  
“I-” Owen sighs, putting his head in his hands. “I don’t know.”  
“You don’t know?” Jack’s tone is incredulous, and Owen hunches his shoulders. It reminds him too much of telling offs from teachers and years of never being good enough for anybody. Jack doesn’t really like them that much, he’s always made it perfectly clear that they’re expendable to him, but he doesn’t need to be so harsh about it all. It’s not like he did it on purpose just to spite him for what happened to Suzie, it wasn’t his fault.  
“Jack-” Gwen starts, but he shoots her a look that tells her not to bother, and she closes her mouth.  
“I’m sorry.” Owen raises his head. “I’m sorry, Jack. I couldn’t help it, okay? It was lonely, and it was scared. It was trapped, it was hurting. What do you expect me to do? I couldn’t just leave it there.”  
“You felt it?” Gwen asks, and Owen nods, taking a deep breath.  
“I felt it. It spoke to me, Jack. It wanted to be free. It was desperate. I didn’t have a choice. It didn’t give me a choice.”  
The anger on Jack’s face melts away, and he leans a little closer to Owen, his hands in his pockets. “What do you mean?”  
“It reached inside me.” Owen could still feel it, a strange sensation that he didn’t know how to begin to describe. “It used me, Jack.”  
“It was just gas, wasn’t it? That can’t be too bad, can it?” Owen knows that Gwen is just trying to make him feel better about the situation but he’s really not in the mood for it. Something beyond human comprehension has been scratching around in his brain, and it hasn’t left him in the best mood.  
“Oh right, right, because gas never did anyone any harm.” It comes out harsher than he intends it to, and Gwen deflates a little. Owen sighs, closing his eyes. He knows she’s trying to help, why the hell can’t he just let her be? He knows the answer to that without needing to think about it. She’s replaced Suzie. Not voluntarily, but she has. It’s supposed to be Suzie standing there, full of fake sympathy, making sarcastic comments that he returns with some of his own. It was supposed to be Suzie in the back of the car, Suzie tossing him tools without him having to ask for them. And it's her instead. Gwen Cooper. And everyone’s acting like it’s normal when it’s not, and it feels like it’s killing him.  
“On the plus side, at least we know what we’re dealing with now.” Jack says. “Owen could feel it, he connected with it. Has to be The Corruption, right?”  
Owen nods. “It was. I don’t know exactly what branch, protector or persecutor, infection or insects or desire, but it was definitely an avatar of The Corruption.”  
“That narrows down the search at least, I’ll tell Tosh to focus on spikes in Corruption energy, it’ll be easier to track if we know what we’re looking for.”  
“See,” Gwen says with a smile. “We’ve already got a plus side.”  
“Yeah, but on the downside, there’s an avatar on the loose. We have no idea how it got here, how powerful it is, or what it wants.”  
“Other than to end the world.” Jack suggests helpfully, and Owen turns dead, exhausted eyes to glare at him.  
“God this is- this has been the worst couple of days ever.” Owen puts his head back into his hands, rubbing at his eyes. He’s exhausted, he’s embarrassed, he’s worried. There’s an avatar out there somewhere because of him. Because he let it in.  
“It’s fine.” Jack says, and that surprises Owen. He was so ready to condemn him five minutes ago, and now he’s acting like it isn’t a problem. Like Owen hasn’t made the biggest mess that a Torchwood agent can make. “Get over it.” Ah, that sounds more like the Jack that he’s used to. Get over it. If only it was that easy. “Now, we find and recover that avatar.”  
“This might help.” Owen turns at the sound of Tosh’s voice, looking up at her expectantly. She’s holding a tablet, looking down at something on the screen, her wrists resting on the railing that surrounds the upper level of the medical bay. “Nightclub death has been phoned into 999, circumstances seem a little unusual. Timing matches a spike in Corruption energy. It happened while we were out, which is why I didn’t know about it before now.”  
Owen turns away, resisting the urge to slam his fists against the metal table. A death. Already. Because of him.  
“Right, come on.” Jack’s already halfway up the stairs, Gwen following, desperate to not be left out of the loop again.  
Owen takes a deep breath to calm himself and slides off the table, reaching for his leather jacket and heading after them. He’ll fix this. He has to.  
\-----------------------------------------------------  
The night is cold, and Gwen regrets not having the presence of mind to bring anything other than her leather jacket with her. Getting out of the warmth of the SUV feels like a curse, the wind picking up a little as if it can sense her vulnerability.  
Jack darts past the police officers waiting in the entrance way, and Tosh and Owen follow, probably more out of a desperation to get back into the warm than anything else. Gwen lingers for a moment for no real reason, allowing the cold to just wash over her. She doesn’t see herself getting a lot of sleep tonight, she’ll take a few seconds of relative quiet wherever she can get it.  
“Gwen?” A voice off to her left causes her to start, and she looks at one of the policemen at the top of the steps, hugging herself. He shifts under the light, and she’s able to make out his face for a moment.  
“Andy. Hi.”  
He’s smiling at her, that bright giddy smile like all of his dreams have come true at once, his hands in his pockets. He looks warm. She’s jealous. “Bloody hell, look at you all posh.” He sounds excited as well, like he hasn’t seen her for years. “Special Ops, eh? We were wondering.”  
She feels guilty for a moment. In everything that happened she hadn’t even thought to call Andy and tell him. Not that he seems to mind all that much, he’s enjoying the news about her change of position more than she is, by the looks of it. “I meant to call, it’s been a bit of a whirlwind.” That’s putting it lightly.  
He shakes his head dismissively, like that doesn’t matter to him, still smiling down at her. “Well, go on then, tell us all.”  
She smiles back at his enthusiasm, and then a figure in the corner of her vision catches her eye.  
“You coming?” Jack sounds impatient, and Gwen nods at him, turning back to Andy apologetically.  
“You can get away now. No point in you freezing your arse off out here.” She tugs the sleeve of his hi-vis jacket playfully, and he’s still smiling, but it doesn’t reach his eyes anymore.  
“You the boss of me now, are you?” It sounds teasing, but Gwen knows Andy well enough by now to know when he’s trying not to show that his feelings have been hurt, and she feels that guilt again.  
“Say hi to everyone for me.” She tells him, tugging at his jacket again, and he just nods, folding his arms across his chest in a way that pulls the material from her grip. It’s discreet enough that he can pretend he did it on accident, but they both know that he didn’t. Gwen resists the urge to look back at him as she follows Jack down the stairs into the nightclub; she doesn’t know what she’ll see if she does. 

Jack beckons for her to stick close as they walk through the nightclub. It’s almost abandoned, a few staff members standing around in corners but no patrons, and the lights are up, bright after the dark of the night outside. She doesn’t think she’s ever been in a place like this with the lights up, she’s not one for that sort of thing usually.  
“Wait until you get a load of this.” Jack says as he leads her, and he sounds almost gleeful about it. Gwen looks up at him, but it’s impossible to read his expression. “If there were any doubts about it being a Corruption avatar, they’re gone now.”  
He pushes his way past Owen and one of the bouncers, nudging Gwen towards the front of the small huddle. She stops in the bathroom doorway, leaning against the frame, unsure of what it is that she’s supposed to be looking at, until she sees it.  
“This is all that’s left?” She can’t hide how horrified she sounds, how much it’s taken her by surprise.  
The bouncer makes a quiet noise of agreement, and then lets out a shaky breath. “I mean, how’s that even possible?”  
“Main question is, how did you know this used to be a person?” Jack speaks up from the back of the huddle, and the bouncer turns, indicating they follow him.  
Gwen puts her hands into her pockets, waiting for the others to move out of her way so that she can follow. Jack said that she would never get sick of running around after him but Gwen thinks she already is.  
Owen mutters something to Tosh, who laughs and mutters something back. Gwen can’t hear what they’re saying and neither does she particularly want to. Owen seems to have cheered up a little more at least, though it’s surprising given how sobering the circumstances are.  
She shuffles into the dark security room behind Tosh, turning her attention to the many small monitors on the space in front of her, each one displaying a different part of the nightclub. The footage is being rewound, blurred with the speed it’s playing at, and Gwen is surprised by how busy the club was. University students, she supposes, and then is filled with a sick sort of realisation as it clicks that what was left of that body in the bathroom was likely barely older than a kid.  
The bouncer pauses the footage and then points to one of the screens in the corner, the one displaying the bathroom. “It’s this one, here.” 

“Wow.” Jack says when it’s over, breaking the uncomfortable silence.  
“My God.” Tosh echoes, still watching the paused screen like she’s expecting something else to happen.  
“He just…”  
“Came and went?” Jack suggests, and Owen snorts, bringing his hand up to his mouth in a poor attempt at covering it up.  
“Now that’s the way I’d like to go.”  
Tosh looks at him over her shoulder, a smile playing at her face. “I’m sure we could arrange it.”  
The bouncer turns around in his chair, and he looks so overwhelmed that Gwen can’t help but feel sorry for him. “How can that be? I mean, it doesn’t make any sense, how is it possible?”  
“Do you know the girl's name?” Gwen asks, putting herself back into the position of a policewoman. It’s clear the others don’t have intention of trying to get any more information out of him, Owen and Tosh have already cleared off and Jack is just standing there, so she might as well make herself useful. “Did her and the boy arrive together or did she meet him inside? Is she a regular here? Is she local? Are any of the other staff likely to recognise her?”  
The bouncer shakes his head, rubbing at his eye. “I-I don’t know. We get hundreds of people here every weekend.” He gestures back to the screens, each one showing at least fifteen different people crammed together and frozen in a moment. “I don’t keep tabs.”  
“Thanks for your help,” Jack cuts in. “You’re free to go, we have everything we need.”  
Gwen watches the bouncer leave and then turns to Jack. “What are you talking about? We don’t know anything, we don’t even have her name!”

Jack meets Tosh outside the security room, indicating she follow him as he heads back into the centre of the nightclub. “We’ll need a body from the cryo-chamber, a close match for the dead guy's appearance. Disfigure the face, drop him somewhere remote, make it look like a suicide. Not the bay though, they pull too many bodies out of there in too short a window and people’ll start to get suspicious.”  
“You have a stash of bodies?” Gwen asks, looking between Tosh and Jack.  
Tosh nods at Jack, ignoring Gwen’s question. “Owen’s gone to get a better look at the remains, see if there’s any residual energy he can get a connection to so he can work out what we’re dealing with.”  
Jack shakes his head. “He can do that later, I need him with me. You too, Gwen.”  
Tosh nods and disappears back in the direction of the toilets, and Owen joins them a few moments later, dusting off his hands and looking expectant. “Tosh said you wanted me?”  
“Yeah, come on.”  
Jack leads them back out of the nightclub, and Gwen vaguely notes that the police presence has dispersed, Andy included. She can’t help but feel a little guilty again, but she’s glad he’s out of the way, she doesn’t need him getting into any trouble with Jack for being somewhere he shouldn’t.  
Jack enters the alleyway next to the club, looking down at a handheld scanner he’d taken out of one of the bags while they were inside, and Gwen asks a question she’s been biting back for a while.  
“What about his family? You can’t just fake his death, it isn’t right.”  
Jack stops short, turning to look at her. “You really want to tell his family that he died screwing an avatar that serves an ancient god of the fear of decay and companionship?”  
“We don’t know that’s what happened.”  
“Look, give it up Newbie.” Owen snaps, his hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched against the cold. “You want to make it better and I get that, but you can’t. It was here, I can feel it. It’s faint but it’s there. The avatar did this. Now we just have to deal with it.”  
Jack looks down at his scanner. “Same energy from the crash site. I thought so, but Owen’s just confirmed it for me. Something definitely happened here.” He turns slowly on the spot, noticing a security camera and pointing up at it. “Let’s see if we can figure out what.” 

The camera quality isn’t the best, the lighting in the alleyway is poor and the footage is grainy, it’s almost impossible to make out the face of the young girl on the screen no matter how hard Gwen tries. Jack slips the disc out of the player, and into a protective case before putting it into his pocket. “Tosh’ll probably be able to get something off it, clean up the footage a little. She’s good at making things work for her like that.”  
Owen sighs from just behind Gwen’s head, and swings a lazy kick at the carpeted floor. “It’s my fault. If it weren’t for me, he’d still be alive.” There it is again, that moment of sobriety from him. He’s not laughing anymore, not like he was before. Gwen can’t decide whether she’s supposed to feel sorry for him or not. She wants to, she knows that it wasn’t his fault, but he doesn’t seem to really care that much, none of them do. She reminds herself that he’s probably used to the death, the destruction, that he’s not even fully human himself, that this avatar is part of him.  
“Thinking like that is going to get you nowhere.” Jack’s tone is dismissive, and it makes Gwen want to swing for him. Sure, they can’t change what’s happened now, but the least he could do is show Owen a little bit of compassion. “At least we know a little more now. The avatar’s taken on a host body, we track her down, we track it down.”  
Owen nods, his face lit only by the monitors in the dark of the security room. “We just have to find it before it kills someone else.”  
\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
“Okay, so, what do we know?” Jack asks, surveying the group huddled around Tosh’s desk.  
“Corruption avatar. Seems to be fueled by desire rather than rot or insects, probably why it took such a liking to Owen.” Tosh says, adjusting the height of her keyboard to avoid looking at the group as she speaks.  
Owen laughs, and Gwen looks between him and Tosh, lost.  
“What’s that supposed to mean?”  
“What, you haven’t noticed it yet?” Owen asks, straightening up. “You haven’t felt that little tugging in your stomach when you look at me, you haven’t noticed how utterly irresistible I am? I’m disappointed.”  
“Ignore him.” Tosh looks up at Owen, and then back at Gwen. “Certain avatars of the Corruption are fueled by a desire, which manifests as both a sexual desire and the desire for companionship. Owen is one such avatar. People are naturally drawn to him, everyone wants to shag him all of the time, and he loves it. Thankfully that’s only a small section of his power. He’s a protector by nature. God help us if he was any more potent, we’d never get anything done around here.”  
“Don’t worry, it wears off the more time you spend around me. And I’m not really looking for any sort of relationship right now, so it’s not like you need to keep your distance.” He’s smiling again, happy and seemingly unburdened by any sort of guilt about his situation. Gwen wonders if he can turn it on and off or if it just happens naturally and he has to ride it out.  
“You don’t have a girlfriend?”  
Owen shakes his head. “Nope. I can get all the grief I need right here in this happy little Hub. Do you?”  
“Boyfriend. His name’s Rhys, he’s a transport manager. What about you, Tosh?”  
“I don’t have time with this job, and it gets harder when your powers and appearance start to develop more. The eight eyes tend to make people uncomfortable.”  
“That’s why I’m lucky. Apart from the fact that I look like I’m dead, you wouldn’t know there was anything weird about me. And some people are into that, the corpse look.”  
“There’s definitely plenty weird about you.” Tosh mutters, and Owen pretends to look affronted.  
“You wound me Tosh, you really do. I thought we were supposed to be a team?”  
“None of you have partners?” This last statement is directed at Jack, who simply shakes his head and looks back at Tosh’s monitor, as if indicating that they have a job to be doing.  
“Just you, Newbie.” Owen leans over the back of Tosh’s chair, rocking it slightly.  
“I’m not being rude or anything, or, well maybe I am, but...How do you switch off from all of this stuff? What do you do to relax?”  
Owen leans against the back of Tosh’s chair again, pushing it down a little. He turns to look over his shoulder at Gwen, his eyes as bright as they were the first time they met. “Well, I torture people in happy relationships. Why are we all gathered around Tosh’s computer like it's the holy grail again?”  
“I’m running a still of the girl from the security footage of the alleyway and running it against the UK population. It’s a lot of data to trawl through but we have no idea where she’s local to, if she was just visiting. This will hopefully narrow it down for us.”  
“You can’t have every face in the UK on there. That would be against civil liberties, data protection, all that stuff.” Gwen doesn’t know why she’s bothering, it’s obvious they don’t care about the same things that she does, which is confirmed to her when Jack sighs.  
“Again, you need to stop saying you, and start saying we. You’re part of this, remember?”  
The computer beeps suddenly, drawing their attention back to it.  
“Damn, one hundred and nineteen suspects, I thought this thing was supposed to be able to give us a single clear match.” Tosh’s computer chair shakes under Owen’s frustrated grip.  
“The CCTV was too low res. I’ve tried magnifying it and augmenting it but it just breaks up, stops the software from working properly. My guess is that the cameras outside aren’t as much of a priority as the cameras inside, we were lucky it even worked.”  
“Well, couldn’t we go back to the nightclub, look over the footage from inside? There has to be some that she appears on, right?” Gwen asks.  
Owen scoffs. “What, and try and search through the hundreds of faces looking for one girl? No way, this was the best option. It’s not like the quality is any better on the cameras inside anyway.”  
“It’s narrowed the numbers down at least, so I could go through the rest by hand?” Tosh suggests, looking up at Jack.  
“You do that. See if The Eye would be willing to help you out with it, maybe? I know your knowledge isn’t limitless but maybe you’ll at least be able to nudge us in the right direction. You could use the practise.”  
“What about the fingerprints I took off the alley wall?” Gwen asks, pointing at the other monitor. Tosh shakes her head, clicking over onto the other screen. “No match. They were incomplete, the computer couldn’t even begin to narrow it down.”  
Gwen tries not to let that disappoint her too much. “That’s fine, it was a long shot anyway.”  
Owen straightens up, pushing himself off of Tosh’s chair and stretching, his joints popping and clicking aggressively. None of the others seem to notice, but it makes Gwen’s skin crawl. “Just a bit, yeah.”  
“At least I’m trying to do something.” She’s a little aggravated that he isn’t trying to do more to fix the mistake that he made. Even if it wasn’t his fault, which everyone seems to agree that it wasn’t, she’d still expect him to have a little more of a conscience about it, but none of them really seem to care, like it’s just business as usual for them.  
“No, you’re trying to do anything. Running around in circles doesn’t fix things. You have to be patient, work out what is and isn’t worth putting effort into, what’s actually going to help and what just makes you feel good because you can say you’ve done something.” Owen turns to her, working his shoulder vicariously in his socket. It finally pops sickeningly and he relaxes a little in obvious relief, moving on to crack his neck instead.  
“Stop that.”  
“I have to do it. I seize up otherwise, and that’s not pretty.” He gives her an apologetic smile that almost seems genuine. “Not that this is exactly pretty either, I suppose.”  
“Can’t you do it somewhere else?”  
“Why? Does it bother you? Can handle the blood and gore of a murder but I crack a knuckle and suddenly it’s all over for you?”

“Right-” Something about Jack’s voice makes them both stop, looking over at him. He’s still watching Tosh’s computer monitor, displaying the one hundred and nineteen matches for the girl on the footage. “The CCTV must have picked up her arrival at the club. We’ve got the timestamp for when the avatar took her on as a host so check the entrance cameras at around that time, go back from there if you need to. Tosh, could you reformat the recognition software and trace her journey backwards via the street cameras?”  
“I’ll have a go. If you asked anybody else it’d be impossible, and even for me it’ll take a while to process. Every possible turn at every street corner in the general Cardiff area? That’s hundreds and thousands of probabilities.”  
“Let’s hope she caught a taxi, a license plate would be easier to track.” Owen chimes in, leaning over Tosh’s chair again.  
“Have a go anyway if not. At least we’ll know where she started the evening.”  
“We could cross-reference that with the addresses of the remaining face matches, see if anything turns up?” Gwen doesn’t have much faith in the idea, and is pleasantly surprised when Owen clicks his fingers and points at her.  
“Good one, Newbie. That’s a bit more like it!”  
“There’s just something that I don’t understand.” Gwen asks, and Owen lets out an over exaggerated sigh, turning to face her.  
“What’s that then, Newbie?”  
“I thought avatars were things like us. Humans, or that Weevil. Why does this one need to take on a host? Shouldn’t it have a physical form of it’s own?”  
Owen shakes his head. “Avatars aren’t limited by the need to be human, or even humanoid. It doesn’t even need to be what we would consider as sentient, as long as it’s been claimed by an entity and it has a consciousness, it can be an avatar. Saying that, it’s all a guessing game, really. Every day we learn something new about avatars, about the world, about ourselves. Torchwood is the only institute that’s ever really looked into it on a scale quite like this, we tend to have to figure it all out as we go along.”  
“So you don’t know? When you make the decisions that you make, when you act upon those choices, you have no idea if you’re actually doing the right thing or not?” That last statement is rather pointedly directed at Jack, who just as pointedly ignores her, watching Tosh flick through the photos of the potential matches. Her computer is scanning back through the street camera footage, and it beeps periodically as it picks up the face of the girl before carrying on again. Tosh looks up at it every now and then, as if trying to compare it to the photos in front of her. 

Gwen turns away from Tosh’s desk after a moment, moving over to sit at her own. Owen follows her, hands in his pockets.  
She looks up at him once it becomes obvious that he wants something. “What?”  
He pulls up his chair and sits down, leaning towards her. “Charming, that. The fellas must love you.”  
“What?” Gwen asks again, a little more aggressively, and Owen raises his hands in surrender.  
“Just checking in. First day, and all that. Bit hectic, I know. I would say it’s not usually like this, but that would be a lie.”  
“Really? You usually release dangerous monsters into Cardiff?”  
He grins. “I don’t make a habit of it, no. You seem to have picked the wrong time to get involved. And they’re not monsters. You can’t demonise them. Yes, they’re killers and yes, they want to end the world, but they’re not monsters. You don’t call a shark a monster when it eats a fish, or a lion a monster when it attacks an antelope, or a cat a monster when it catches a bird. They’re doing what their instinct dictates, what they’re hardwired to do. It isn’t their fault.”  
“And yet you still kill them.”  
“It can’t always be avoided. If they’re actively trying to prepare a ritual or cause harm then you have to make a choice. Them or everyone else, and it’s our job to protect civilians. If they haven’t hurt anyone, I prefer to leave them be. Jack just seems to like wiping them out. He’s brutal with them.” Owen sighs, shaking his head. “I don’t get it, I really don’t. I mean, I get having to protect people but that whole thing about having to kill anyone that approaches Stage Four? Me and Tosh are Stage Two, she’s almost Stage Three, I don’t want to have to kill her one day. I get why he’s cautious, it’s understandable he wouldn’t know who to trust after Yvon-”

“Carys Fletcher!”  
Owen looks up at the sound of Tosh’s voice. “Huh?”  
“The girl, the one the avatar took on as a host. Her name’s Carys Fletcher.”  
Owen gets out of his seat and Gwen follows him, intrigued.  
Tosh is holding a picture in her hands, and Gwen leans over Owen’s shoulder to get a look at it.  
“You sure that’s her?”  
Tosh nods. “The Eye is never wrong. Well, almost never. It drew me to this one. It’s her.”  
“Nice work. Address?” Jack leans against the desk, looking down at her.  
“Got it. Ten minutes away.”  
Owen takes the picture out of Tosh’s hands. “This is her? She’s a kid.”  
“She’ll be twenty in a month and a half.”  
“Christ.” Owen throws the paper down, taking a step away from the desk. “Christ.”  
“We have a name, an address, what are we waiting for?” Jack pushes himself off of the desk. “Last one to the SUV has to clean it out this weekend.”  
\----------------------------------------------------------------  
“You ready?” Jack asks, tossing a glance into the back of the car where Tosh and Gwen are sitting. “Remember, we have no idea what exactly it is we’re going to be dealing with, how powerful that avatar is. Be careful.”  
“We do not hurt Carys.” Owen looks across at Jack from the driver's seat - his tone leaves no room for argument. “This isn’t her fault.”  
“She’s killed someone, Owen.”  
“She hasn’t, the avatar has. She isn’t like us. The power, the feeling, it isn’t coming from within her, you know it isn’t. You don’t hurt her, Jack, you hear me? The avatar will just take a new host if you do, and it’ll be another innocent life lost for nothing.”  
“Your entity, your call, that’s what you always say, isn’t it it Jack?” Tosh asks, reaching forwards to tap Owen on the shoulder and indicate as he passes the house.  
Gwen doesn’t miss the glare that Jack shoots her through the rearview mirror, but he concedes.  
“Fine. You take the lead on this one, Owen.”  
Owen nods, smiling as he pulls the car up onto the pavement outside the house. He looks at Gwen over his shoulder, and his smile grows. “Hang back on this one, Newbie.”  
So she does.

Maybe a little too much, because Carys dodges past her and makes for the open door before Gwen has even fully realised she’s there. She makes a noise of surprise as Carys knocks her into the doorframe, stumbling back over her feet and reaching out a hand to catch herself. There’s the sound of creaking somewhere behind her as she gets her balance back, Jack’s hand on her shoulder steadying her.  
Owen is standing halfway up the stairs, leaning against the bannister and looking rather proud of himself. Carys has stopped still in the entryway, surrounded by something flowing from a small circular device that warps and twists the air around her into a funnel.  
“What’s that?”  
Owen makes his way down the stairs towards her, dusting off his hands. “It’s a sort of inflatable cell, something to do with The Buried, possibly? I didn’t bother to check the label on it, and the archives aren’t exactly well organised. The power runs down after an hour though, the battery life on these sorts of things is absolute bollocks.”  
“Who said you could use that?”  
Owen turned to look at Jack, eyebrow quirked. “Er, I just stopped a prisoner from escaping, a thanks would be nice. Maybe?”  
“You know the rules. None of that stuff leaves the Hub without my express permission.”  
“Whatever happened to my entity, my call? I thought I was the one calling the shots here? Besides, it’s not like any of you were going to be able to stop her. I screw up, I fix it, that’s how it works isn’t it? Well, I fixed it.” Owen gestures to Carys, and then sighs. “Fine, don’t thank me.”  
Jack pulls up his sleeve, glaring at Owen as he fiddles with one of the many buttons, dials and switches on his wrist strap. The cell powers down with a low hum, and Owen steps closer to Carys, watching her to make sure she doesn’t try and run again while he picks the device up from the carpet.  
Gwen holds her hand out to Carys once Owen is back in position, indicating for her to step forwards. “It’s okay. Come with us.” 

The drive back to the Hub is silent apart from the stereo playing. Owen drums his fingers on the wheel to the sound of the music, it’s some late 90s pop-punk shit that Gwen can’t exactly say she’s surprised he enjoys listening to. A quick glance towards the front of the car tells her it’s a CD playing, not the radio. Why Owen has chosen this moment to commandeer the CD player, she isn’t entirely sure, but she hopes it’s a mixtape, and not fourty five minutes of whatever artist this is. Carys sits quietly in between her and Tosh, shoulders hunched, hands in her lap, staring out of the windshield at the road ahead. Gwen offers her a smile a few times, it gets ignored. Owen flicks back and forth through the songs on the CD, listening to some more than once, adjusting the volume every few seconds. It seems to Gwen like he’s the primary driver, and like the others are used to tuning him out. She doesn’t think it’ll be long before she’s doing the same.  
Owen parks at the base of the water tower, indicating for them to get out. “I’ll meet you inside, you don’t need to wait.”  
“Wasn’t going to.” Jack tells him, and Owen sticks his middle finger up before pulling away.  
Carys looks from Gwen to Jack and back again, shifting on her feet, and Gwen points down towards the bay. “Come on.” She’s not exactly sure why she’s being left in charge of Carys, since she knows the least about what’s going on, but she follows Jack and Tosh down towards the tourist centre anyway.

It still looks like it's abandoned, Owen had rather sarcastically told her that that was the entire point when she’d asked about it. Gwen thinks that having a fully operational and functional tourist office might be less suspicious to passersby than all of them entering and leaving a supposedly abandoned building at random points throughout the day, but Jack had explained they were short enough staffed as it was without having to have somebody sat behind a desk handing out pamphlets at all hours. Having the office actually be in business was a very easy way of drawing a lot of attention that they didn’t need, allegedly. Then Tosh had remarked that they might draw less attention if Jack stopped branding every item he so much as brushed up against with the Torchwood logo, and the conversation had very abruptly ended.  
Gwen thinks she’s starting to get used to the fact that nobody seems to really know what they’re doing around here. In Jack’s case, he acts like he knows, but Gwen thinks he’s just as clueless as the rest of them really. Maybe not clueless, they’re definitely smart, but they seem to just wander from Point A to Point B with something vaguely like a plan, hoping it all turns out okay in the end. Maybe that’s what they have to do, in a job like this. Make it up as they go along. She’s not sure how much she likes that. 

One thing she hasn’t gotten used to is the size of the Hub, she’s always expecting the cavern to be considerably smaller than it actually is when she walks into it. Carys draws a little closer to her, and Gwen can’t exactly blame her.  
“Right. See what you can find out from her.” It takes Gwen a moment to realise that Jack is talking to her, looking expectantly over his shoulder as he walks away.  
“But, aren’t you going to help me? I don’t know what I’m doing.”  
Jack turns on his heel. “Usually better if you don’t say that in front of the prisoner. You know how to talk, don’t you? What else do you need?”  
Gwen looks to Tosh for help but she’s already sat at her desk, and a quick glance behind her shows that Owen is still yet to reappear from parking the car. Part of her hopes that Jack will change his mind, but he disappears back into his office and Gwen realises he’s more serious about his whole ‘drop-you-into-the-deep-end’ method than she thought. 

She leads Carys down to the cells, unsure exactly what she’s supposed to ask her. It would be different if she was an avatar like Tosh or Owen, but she isn’t. The avatar isn’t a part of Carys, not like it is the others, not like it is her. She hasn’t thought about that much, the fact that she’s one of them. She doesn’t feel any different, she doesn’t feel inhuman or anything like that. She’s just Gwen Cooper, same as she’s always been.  
“Are you MI5?” Carys voice pulls Gwen out of her thoughts. She’s sat on the small seat inside the cell, her arms folded protectively around herself. “Where am I? What do you want?”  
Gwen sighs, turns to face her. “I think you know the answer to that, Carys.”  
Carys stands, makes her way towards the glass, curls her fingers through one of the holes in the wall between them. “How do you know my name? I’ve never been in trouble. What do you want from me?”  
Gwen takes a small step back, swallowing. “I know there’s something inside of you, and I know what it made you do. It isn’t your fault Carys, we both know that, don’t we? But his name was Matt Stevens, and his parents lost their only child at seven past three this morning.”  
Carys shudders, bringing her arms back around herself, and Gwen watches a strange sheen pass over her, a pink translucent film that seems to radiate from her very soul.  
“It’s you. I don’t want you.” The voice that speaks with Carys’s mouth is not her own. “Where is the other one? The one of the Crawling Rot?”  
“Owen?”  
The avatar nods. “He freed me. I wish to thank him.”  
“Maybe later. What do you want from us then? To end the world?”  
The avatar laughs. “Who said anything about ending the world? I have no interest in the ritual. The end of the world couldn’t give me what I want. A place of pure fear could never give me what I want.”  
“Which is?”  
“The energy. The climax. I live off of that energy.”  
Gwen frowns. She knows that not all avatars are driven by a desire to end the world, Jack told her that at least. Tosh said something about certain avatars of The Corruption being fueled by a sexual desire, an overriding instinct. “Right, sorry. Just to recap, you feed off of orgasmic energy?”  
“There’s nothing else like it. Desires are such a human thing, they’re so raw, so primal. Fear and desire are opposites, and there is something so inviting in that contrast.”  
That pink sheen melts back into her skin, and Carys looks up at Gwen with wide frightened eyes. “Sit with me, please? I don’t like this.”  
She reaches out an imploring hand, taking a step away from the glass, and against her better judgement, Gwen reaches up to open the cell. Carys takes another step back away from her, and it gives Gwen a little bit of reassurance. The cells are uncomfortable, intimidating, she can’t really blame Carys for not wanting to be alone in there. Grouping her in with the Weevils as something to be contained doesn’t really seem fair to Gwen, and if there’s anything she can do to make this experience a little bit easier for her, she’s going to do it.  
The door shuts again behind her, and Gwen realises her mistake as soon as the avatar pins her to the wall. 

“Uh,” There’s the squeak of Owen’s chair as he turns to look at Jack and Tosh, both of whom are focused on something on one of Tosh’s monitors. “Uh, guys, we might have a bit of a situation. Guys?”  
Jack looks up. “What’s that?”  
“Gwen’s getting a bit handsy with The Corruption, one of you might need to go and sort her out. Last thing thing we need is her getting touched by something this early on.”  
Jack straightens up and walks over, and Owen points to the monitor above his desk, projecting the security footage from within Carys’s cell.  
“Ah.”  
“You did warn her, didn’t you?” Tosh asks, rolling across the room on her computer chair. “About dual control avatars?”  
“No.” Jack looks at her out of the corner of his eye. “No, I thought it would be a learning experience for her.”  
“We should go and get her.” Tosh stands.  
“You can, I’m staying here.” Owen says, looking over his shoulder at her. “Y’know, with the desires and all that. I’d rather not risk anything.”  
Tosh rolls her eyes at him but heads off towards the cells, Jack following after her.  
Owen sighs, turning his attention back to the folder on his desk. Carys and the avatar are separate, but he doesn’t understand where the avatars come from. Most of them tend to just appear on earth one day, they don’t usually fall from the sky in chunks of rock. He’s checked everything they have on record for The Corruption, and no avatar similar to this has been seen before. There are plenty that run on sexual desire, his own name comes up in the search a few times, but none that accurately match what they’re dealing with here. It’s a stand alone avatar then, from what he can gather. Not part of a larger species like the Weevils, it’s a completely unique identity. He’d joked about it coming directly from the entity itself but if it had been sent by The Corruption then it had to be here for a reason. Owen doesn’t remember the last time they dealt with a Corruption avatar but he thinks it’s been a while. It tends to be Weevils that are popping up more often than anything else recently. The Great Twisting only failed seven months ago, he’s expecting silence from the Spiral for another eighteen months at the very least, and the other entities have also been acting on the downlow. Nobody’s tried to end the world recently, nobody’s really caused that much trouble. To say the twenty-first century is when everything changes, the gods are being unusually quiet.  
He sighs, standing up and making his way towards the cells. Maybe Tosh would know, it’s worth asking her, he supposes. Non-human avatars are almost always created with a set purpose in mind, and considering how close he is to this one, he doesn’t like that he can’t figure it out. He thinks he should be able to feel something at least, something more than that initial connection. It hasn’t tried to reach into his mind again, and he’s grateful for that because it wasn’t a pleasant experience, but it also hasn’t given him any indication as to what it wants, why it’s here. Beyond sex, but that’s practically a given. 

It isn’t Tosh that he encounters coming up out of the cells though, it’s Gwen. He can’t help but grin at her despite himself, despite the situation. “Way to go, Newbie! Now that is what I call a methodical investigation, I can’t wait to see you take down her-”  
He’s abruptly cut off as Gwen drives him back into the wall with a force that takes him by surprise, her hands around his shirt collar. He strikes his head against the slope of the ceiling, biting back a curse and resisting the urge to shove her away. “What are you doing? Get off me.”  
“That girl's body is being overrun by something that we can’t even begin to fully understand because of something that you did, and you think it’s a joke?”  
Owen swallows, trying to ignore how close she’s pressed against him. He closes his eyes, tipping his head back a little. It almost hurts, being so close to her. She’s so full of love, he can feel it under her skin. Suzie never felt like this. There was never any love in her, not like there is in Gwen. There’s so much love he thinks it might kill him if he lets it stay any longer, so he puts his hands over hers and pushes her away. “Alright, Jesus. I’m sorry.”  
“We should be helping her! She’s not some lab rat!”  
Owen nods, trying to ignore the fact that his hands are still around her wrists. He didn’t realise how empty he was until he felt her. Whether it’s just the strength of the connection between them or she’s actually that full of love he doesn’t know, but the part of him that thrives on companionship aches with the dull pain of loneliness. It’s Jack. Jack’s keeping them all apart. That bullshit about not being allowed to get attached to each other, can’t he see the harm that it does to them? Can’t he see how much they need each other, how much better they could be if he just let them get close?  
Gwen pushes back against him, and Owen lets her force his hands down to his sides, just taking it in for a moment. He could almost cry, it feels so nice. To be this close to somebody again after so long, somebody that loves, that cares. He hadn’t realised how consumed by the dark Suzie had become until this moment, hadn’t realised how empty her words and her touches had been until now, feeling the grip, the tension of somebody alive, strong and so unbearably close to human. That tension sparks something in him and he growls, bringing his hands back up, pinned to the wall on either side of his shoulders. “No, she’s a murderer. And you were the one who wanted her caught. How come suddenly she’s your best friend?”  
He forces his eyes open, taking in Gwen’s expression. She doesn’t feel it like he does, there’s no way that she could, but her eyes are open and wide and Owen can’t stop a smirk from forcing its way onto his face.  
“You know-” Jack’s voice speaks from somewhere on his left and Owen forces his head around to look at him, “strictly speaking, throttling the staff is my job.”  
Owen wants to speak up, to say it’s fine, he doesn’t mind, this is the most alive he’s felt in as long as he can remember, but Gwen lets go of his arms and backs away and Owen settles himself with adjusting his collar and pretending he’s annoyed at her.  
“So, now that’s over, who's for Chinese?”  
\--------------------------------------------------------------------  
“And she said, if I’d known what he was, I never would have married him.” Jack laughs, shaking his head.  
Tosh leans forward, jabbing at the air with her finger. “She knew! She knew all along!”  
“And she didn’t care, until he started leaving black piles of mucus in the bathtub.” Owen taps his fork against the table.  
“Always the big giveaway. Non-human borne Corruption avatars have no sense of household hygiene. Which reminds me - gotta pee.” Jack gets up, moving around the outside of the conference table. Owen watches him walk out of the door, waiting for it to close behind him before he leans in conspiratorially.  
“So, what’s he told you?”  
Gwen looks at him blankly. “What about?”  
Tosh leans in too, moving her chair closer to Owen. “Himself.”  
Gwen looks between them, not sure what they mean. “You’ve both been here longer than I have.”  
“Right,” Owen nods. “But we were banking on you. I mean, you’re a copper, you’re trained to ask questions, get information out of difficult people. He should be right up your alley. Tosh has tried, but even her magical psychic powers don’t work on him.”  
“You don’t know anything about him?”  
“Nothing. Not who he serves, not what stage he is, not how he came into his power. Absolutely nothing. Other than-” Tosh glances over her shoulder as if checking Jack isn’t about to walk back in, “him being gay.”  
Gwen’s brow furrows. “Is he? Really? You think so?”  
Owen rolls his eyes, as if this is a frequent topic of discussion between them. “I do, she doesn’t.”  
“He’s not.”  
Owen taps his fork on the table again and takes a sip from his bottle of beer. “How many times, Tosh? Period military is not the dress code of a straight man. Even without your spooky Eye powers, you should know that.”  
“I think it suits him.” Gwen admits, looking down at her food. “It’s sort of...classic.”  
Tosh points at her triumphantly. “Exactly! Besides, I’ve watched him in action. He’ll shag anything if it’s gorgeous enough.”  
Owen looks across at her. “So, not straight then. Don’t go back on what you’ve been insisting for the last five years because you don’t want to be proved wrong in front of the Newbie.”  
“Is that how long you’ve been here? Five years?”  
Tosh nods. “Probably the best five years of my life.”  
“I’ve only been here four. Wouldn’t go so far as to say they’re the best years but they’ve definitely been fun.”  
“All that time and you still don’t know anything about him? I mean, we know he’s from America, right?”  
Tosh shakes her head. “We don’t even know that. There’s been no US citizen by the name of Jack Harkness born in the last fifty years.”  
Gwen shrugs. “Maybe his identity’s classified?”  
Owen shakes his head. “You don’t get much more classified than this. I think he’s an avatar of The Lonely, has to be at least an early Stage Three if he’s been around for as long as he has.”  
“Well, he must have his reasons for wanting to keep his identity a secret.”  
“I’m sure he does, but it doesn’t stop me wanting to know what they are. What about you, anyway, Newbie?”  
“What about me?”  
“You’re an End avatar, right? What can you do? Avatars don’t usually find us, we find them, so what happened with you?”  
Gwen shrugs. “I only know I’m an End avatar because that’s what Jack told me I was. I don’t know how I found you. I didn’t know I was going to find you. I just had this feeling that something was going to happen that day. That was why I tried so hard to find you. I knew that I had to.”  
“Predicting? That’s typically an Eye ability, is Jack sure you’re an End avatar?” Owen leans forwards, head cocked to the left. “What did you tell him that made him decide you were an End avatar?”  
“He asked me when I first got my stripe.” Gwen touches the streak of white in her hair.  
“And you said…?”  
“The first time I investigated a murder scene.”  
Owen nods, sitting back in his seat. “Intense emotions surrounding death. Anger? A sense of injustice? Sadness? Sounds about right for an End avatar. Hell of a coincidence though.”  
“Or was it?” Tosh asks.  
Owen looks at her. “What?”  
“You’re assuming Gwen just so happened to get involved with us the day before Suzie died. What if The End called her to us because it knew that Suzie was going to die?”  
Owen shakes his head. “I don’t like that.”  
“Why not?”  
“Because that means that they’re probably planning something. And The End doesn’t have a ritual, that’s one of the few things we know for certain about it. So what’s it doing? What does it gain from this?”  
Tosh looks at him. “No idea, Owen. But it’s not really something worth stressing over now, is it? Hmm?”  
“There’s something else I don’t get about you. You didn’t appear on our radar.”  
Gwen looks at Owen. “What?”  
“The computer system that we’ve got, the one that picks up spikes of avatar energy, you didn’t set it off. You don’t even appear on it, that’s why we couldn’t track you down.”  
“Is that a problem?”  
Owen shrugs and takes another swig of beer. “I don’t know if it's necessarily a problem. It’s just weird. We’ve never had an avatar not trigger an alert before when they use their power. We’ve never had an avatar just waltz up after not appearing on the system. We had no idea you existed until you turned up at that crime scene.”  
The door opens as Jack walks back in, and Owen and Tosh immediately turn their attention back to their food, but Gwen’s attention has been caught by something else. Carys is crying.

From where she’s sitting, she can see the video footage from the cells on the monitor on the opposite wall. She can see Carys, curled up in the corner of the cell, head down, hugging herself. The sight fills Gwen with a sort of angry determination. “What are we doing having Chinese while a girl fights for her life?”  
“Well, actually-” Jack sits down, stretching his arms out ahead of him. “While we've been eating, the computers have been running a full bio-scan on Carys, profiling her blood, organs, everything, so we can see what effect the Corruption is having on her. We’re also taking samples of the air in the cell so we can analyse the changes in the environment around her.”  
He sounds far too pleased with himself, and Gwen wants nothing more than to wipe that self-satisfied arrogance off his face.  
“You’ve been down here too long. Spending all this time living in the dark with the things that go bump in the night. You can’t remember what it’s like to be human anymore, can you?”  
Jack shrugs, and raises an eyebrow at her. “So remind us, Gwen Cooper. Show us what it means to be a human in the twenty-first century.”  
Gwen stands up and nods. “Alright. I will.”  
Owen rolls his eyes, watching her walk out of the conference room. He turns to look at Jack, frowning and dropping his fork onto the table with a clatter. “And you couldn’t have waited until we’d all finished eating, no?”  
\-----------------------------------------------------------------------  
“Carys Fletcher, born 13th November 1987.” Gwen points at the makeshift board she’s got set up, pieces of paper and sticky notes and pictures stuck onto the glass partition Jack had been standing at earlier. “School reports, personnel files from her temping agency, swimming badges. Reports of her mother's death in a car crash. And last year's emails discussing the merits of Orlando Bloom and Heath Ledger.”  
Jack glances over it, nodding. “And what’s all this for?”  
Gwen folds her arms across her chest. “Because this isn’t about avatars and gods and rituals. This is about a young girl that needs helping, that needs saving. And we can do something for her. Earlier, Carys said that she was being taken over, the Corruption was consuming her. So-” Gwen gestures to the board behind her with a flourish, “-we give her a way to keep hold of who really she is.”  
Jack nods, looking over the web of Carys Fletchers life again, and he can’t help but smile at it. At Gwen. She’s so different to Suzie. Jack has never met an End avatar so deeply rooted in life, in its protection and its sacrality. Most End avatars find their calling in death, not life. It’s definitely something special, something to hold on to. “That’s brilliant. You are brilliant.” He’s surprised by how much he means it, by how much weight the words carry. A death avatar rooted in life - what a gift.  
“Thank you. Right, I think we should bring her father in.”  
Jack lets his head drop, sighing. “You’re kidding, right? Please, tell me you’re kidding.”  
Gwen folds her arms across her chest. “Jack, we have to find a way to connect with her.”  
“Our priority is to neutralise the threat, not put more people at risk.”  
“We should be helping her.”  
“There is no way-”  
“If we don’t then who will, Jack?”  
He sighs, putting his hands in his pockets. “Are you always this awkward?” He’s starting to change his mind about exactly how brilliant she is. She may be rooted more in life than in death but she’s still got the stubbornness that comes with knowing that everything bows down to you eventually.  
“Guys.” Tosh beckons them over to her desk. “You might want to take a look at this. This is the normal chemical composition of the air in that cell. And these are the readings from the last hour. The avatar’s secreting an ultra powerful blend of airborne sex pheromones. A thousand times more potent than anything we'd normally experience.”  
“She’s a walking aphrodisiac.”  
“God.” Gwen says, “Imagine what’d happen if we put her in a room with-”  
Tosh turns her head to look at the desk beside her own, and Gwen copies her. The unusually quiet, empty desk.  
“-Owen.”  
\--------------------------------------------------------------------------  
Gwen and Tosh come to a stop in front of the cells, and Gwen fails to fully bite back a laugh at the sight of her coworker. Owen glares out at her from behind the glass wall, looking away.  
“Yeah, alright. Laugh it up.”  
“Jack, Carys is out of her cell.” Tosh relays over the comms, looking back the way they’ve just come as if expecting to see her. There’s only one way out of the cells, and she’s fairly certain they didn’t pass her on the way down.  
“The cheeky bitch took my wipe card!” Owen complains, shuffling a little on the spot uncomfortably. “I was taking some readings, keeping an eye on her, you know, and then uhhh, well, I think you can work out the rest.”  
“Be grateful she was only interested in your swipe card.” Tosh tells him, and Owen nods.  
“Right, yeah. Tosh darling, be a dear and pass my trousers would you?”  
Tosh rolls her eyes, spotting Owen’s discarded clothes in a heap on the floor and reaching to pick them up. Carys had clearly abandoned them in her hurry to get out of the Hub.  
“Take your time Owen, not like we’re in a rush or anything.” Gwen turns her back on Owen as Tosh opens the cell, watching the Weevil opposite instead.  
“Yeah, well, nobody asked you to hang around and gawp, did they Cooper?” She can hear the sound of his clothes rustling, and catches Tosh’s eye in the reflection of the cell opposite. She just grins.  
Gwen rolls her eyes and turns back around as Owen struggles into his polo, abandoning his t-shirt on the floor of the cell. “Are you alright now? Or are you still feeling a bit of a cock?”  
Owen sticks his middle finger up at her, smoothing down his collar with his other hand and scowling. “Like I said, laugh it up Cooper. I’m starting to really dislike Corruption avatars, you know.”

Jack stops Carys in front of the Rift Manipulator, that pink film settled over her skin again. He can see the avatar in her eyes, he doesn’t know how much of Carys is left in her anymore. The Corruption, it’s by far the nastiest entity in his opinion, especially those of it that find their comfort in companionship, in belonging. It’s one of his main issues with Owen, that some small part of him thrives on needing and being needed in turn.  
“No exit, sorry.”  
Carys feints to the left then darts right, and Jack reaches out for her but can’t quite stretch across the table between them. She pulls back out of his reach, looking around for an exit. After a moment she changes tact, lunging for him, and he’s forced to retreat. It’s a clumsy attempt at a swing, the avatar clearly isn’t used to inhabiting a body yet, but the force behind it is intense.  
“You want a little rough and tumble, yeah? Well then, let’s make it a fair fight.”  
Goading an avatar is never wise, but it’s not like she’s going to grow fangs and spit venom at him or anything like that. At the end of the day Carys is still just a girl, he could overpower her easily if he absolutely had to.  
“You won’t stop me.” She sounds so sure, so confident it grates at him.  
“Oh yeah?” He takes another swipe at her, moving around the back of the table, and Carys glances over for something else. Her eyes fall on one thing, and Jack finds himself hoping that she won’t. She does.  
“Put it down. That’s worthless to anyone but me! Put it down or I’ll shoot.”  
Carys is clutching the jar containing the Doctor's hand like it's a lifeline, swallowing. There’s fear in her eyes for a moment, and then it’s gone, swallowed back down by The Corruption inside her. “Says he will but the eyes say he won’t.”  
It’s a simple sentence, but something about it chills Jack to his core, so much so that he doesn’t notice as Carys continues to back away. Maybe it’s the way she says it, the look in her eyes, the triumph. Maybe it’s how easily she can look into his soul, his heart bared to her in a way it has never been to anybody else. No, not her. It. That thing is not Carys Fletcher and it very likely will never be again and that inspires Jack to raise his gun a little higher, his finger against the trigger. The doors of the lift close, and Carys disappears from sight.  
Jack races up the stairs, heading up towards the tourist office. If he can make it to the passageway before the lift gets there then Carys won't make it into the office, let alone out of it. She’s already in the office by the time he makes it to the top of the stairs and he swears under his breath.  
Carys stops, still holding the jar to her chest. Jack raises his gun again, holding his other hand out in her direction. “Give me the jar.”  
Carys looks at him, then down at the jar in her arms. She glances back up at Jack, over her shoulder at the exit, and then at the desk off to her left. Jack watches her adjust her grip on the jar nervously before she throws it over the desk and onto the floor. Jack holds his breath, waiting for the shattering of glass. By the time Tosh and Gwen make it up to the tourist office with Owen in tow, Carys is long gone.  
\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
“After all that I said to you, a severed hand means more to you than Carys’s life.” Gwen has her arms folded across her chest, unimpressed.  
Jack’s sat on the edge of Tosh’s desk, his legs crossed at the ankles. “You want to prove yourself to me that badly? Find her. Make your old pals at the police do something useful for once, maybe? Be like Owen, do something useful.”  
Gwen nods. “Alright, I’ll give them a call. We can put out an APB. Girl possessed by the servant of a fear god knobbing fellas to death.”  
“Oi, you lot?” Owen’s voice carries across the Hub from his little nook below them. “You’d better come and get a look at this.”  
Gwen looks across at Jack who nods, pushing himself off the desk lightly. Tosh stays on the upper level of the Hub and leans against the railing, a little hesitant to get any closer to whatever science experiment Owen has constructed down there. She’s learned it's best to keep her distance when he gets into these sorts of moods, he has the potential to cause unending chaos and she likes to be as far away from the source of the problem as possible when things inevitably go awry. Gwen and Jack have no such qualms, Gwen because she doesn’t know any better and Jack because she has a feeling he just doesn't care.

On the table in front of Owen, in a small glass case, is a white rat. He’s grinning at it like a kid on Christmas morning, and Tosh starts to wonder where exactly he got the rat from before she realises that’s probably not the biggest issue.  
Owen rubs his hands together, shuffling on the spot excitedly. “Okay, so. I’ve been trying to interpret the results of the bioscan, yeah? But, well, it’s just a mess. There’s no definite readings, because everything in her body keeps changing, nothing’s staying constant. As soon as you think something’s stabilised, the metabolic rate, the blood pressure, whatever, it all just goes completely wild again.”  
“Because she’s fighting the avatar for control of her body?”  
Owen nods. “Right, and partly because the avatar is speeding through the stages of development now that it’s taken a host. So, I decided to do a comparative diagnostic. Recreate the circumstances on the rat, see what’s gonna happen to Carys.”  
Gwen nods. “Yeah, thanks.”  
Owen cuts his eyes at her, and then turns to Jack. “So, I took a little bit of my DNA, injected it into the rat. Obviously, it’s not going to be exactly the same. The avatar we’re dealing with has a far higher dependency on desire than I do, but Carys is a lot bigger than a rat, so with any luck they’ll cancel each other out.”  
“It looks fine so far.” Tosh calls down, and then takes a small step away from the railing for good measure.  
“So far.” Owen echoes. “But once the gases start to flow around the body, that’s when the party really starts. The heart rate triples and the brain swells, causing it to press against the skull. As that keeps going, the lungs begin to shrink, making it impossible to breathe. The pressure on the internal organs continues to increase until finally…”  
With a pathetic attempt at a squeak, the rat quivers, and then explodes, smearing the inside of the glass container with blood, gore and fur. As it does so, a wild look of pain flashes across Owen’s face and he tenses up instinctively. It passes after a moment, and he reaches behind him for his stool, sitting down shakily.  
“I forgot injecting my DNA into it would make it part of The Corruption.” He shudders, looking up at Jack. “That hurt.” 

“That’s what’s going to happen to Carys?” Jack asks, and Owen nods, slumping back against the countertop behind him.  
“I’m losing, that’s what she said to me.” Gwen looks between Jack and Owen, and Owen nods.  
“Right now it’s a struggle between where Carys ends and The Corruption starts. Both of them are vying for dominance, but you pitch a nineteen year old against part of a god and the winner is obvious.”  
“What do you mean, part of a god?” Gwen asks. “I thought avatars were the servants of a god, not part of it.”  
“They are. But I don’t think it’s an avatar. I think it’s actually a fragment of The Corruption itself that somehow slipped through into our reality. Think about it. We picked it up the second it hit our radars, the second it was created. Could a Stage One avatar do what that thing did? Invade the mind of another avatar of the same entity and compel it to free it?”  
“It said it had no interest in the ritual.” Gwen says, shaking her head. “I spoke to it. It didn’t want to end the world.”  
“Well, maybe it was just saying that?” Owen folds his arms defensively, sitting up again.  
“We can figure that out later, for now the priority is finding Carys.”  
Gwen nods. “We have to think like her, put ourselves in her place. It’s the only way we’ll find her.”  
“Except we have no idea what the controlling impulse is now, Carys or the avatar.”  
Tosh shakes her head. “The overriding desire for the avatar is sex. By this point, even if Carys is mostly in control, that’ll still be her main drive.”  
“Okay,” Gwen nods, leaning back against the table, thinking. “You’re desperate for sex because you know that’s what the thing inside of you needs, but you know it will kill. Where would you go?”  
“I’d come round and shag you.” Owen’s looking up at Gwen, his chin resting on the palm of his hand. He only half means it. He can feel the love on her even from here, drawing him in. People act like they’re pulled to him but it can sometimes be a two way street. He doesn’t usually feel this sort of pull from people until he knows them better, and by that point the influence he has on them has typically waned, but that isn’t the case with Gwen, and it’s playing havoc with his system. “What?” He says, when he notices the three pairs of eyes on him. “It’s a joke. Can’t I have a joke with my teammates?”  
“Right now? No.” The way that Tosh is looking at him lets him know that she knows it wasn’t a joke. She doesn’t look annoyed at least, she knows it won’t make a difference to get frustrated with him. He needs companionship just as much as she needs knowledge, and it’s gotten them both into plenty of trouble at points, so she’s the last person that’s going to penalise him for something she knows he can’t help.  
“Okay, so, what are we talking about? Brothels? Lap dance clubs? Anywhere there’s a hoard of eager men?”  
Tosh thinks for a moment, drumming her fingers on the railing. “I know what I’d do.”  
Jack looks up in time to watch her turn away from the railing, and nods, following her back into the main section of the Hub. “Good work, Owen! Now clean up that mess.”  
Owen looks at the glass case and then at Gwen, smiling. “Don’t suppose you’d give me a hand, would you Newbie?”  
“Dream on, Doctor Harper.” 

Tosh is stood in front of the board detailing Cary’s life when Gwen joins her, Jack at her shoulder.  
“What are you looking for?”  
Tosh doesn’t answer him, just keeps scanning the web of string and paper and pictures, biting her lip in concentration. Her eyes dart over it in its entirety a few times before she looks across at Gwen. “You’ve got her emails, do you have her text history?”  
“No.” Gwen shakes her head. “No, I didn’t-”  
“I’ll get her text history then.” Tosh turns to Jack. “Should take me around five minutes to find what I want.”  
“You know what you’re looking for?”  
“I have a hunch. If I’m right then I’m right, if I’m wrong then at least it’s another possibility knocked off the list.”  
Jack smiles. “Good enough for me. Go on then.” 

Gwen watches Tosh walk over to her desk. “A hunch?”  
“Benefit of serving the Eye. Tosh’s hunches are almost never wrong. Certain information she can just pull out of thin air. Historical facts, dates, figures, useless trivia, she can just access whenever she wants. Stuff like this, things that are happening in real time around her, things that depend on human nature, they’re often harder for her to get a decent grasp on, but the Eye will sometimes give her a nudge in the right direction.”  
Gwen nods. “And Owen’s better at that stuff? The emotional stuff?”  
Jack raises an eyebrow. “The only thing Owen is good at is causing problems. I think we’ll find you’re the one to turn to for matters of human nature, being the most human of us.”  
“I thought you said Owen was a protector by nature?”  
“He is. But that doesn’t really mean much. It boosts his desire for companionship and his ability to pick up on the physical pain of others, but-”  
“I was right!” Tosh’s voice is gleeful, and Jack holds his finger up to Gwen, walking over to her desk.  
“Right about what?”  
“Eddie Gwynne.” Tosh smiles, proud of herself. “Pretty young girl her age, likely she’s in a relationship. That seems the best place to start, but if she knows she’s dangerous, she won’t want to go for somebody she cares about. Ex-boyfriend then. I checked her text history, it’s a pretty fresh breakup. She’s angry, she doesn’t care what happens to him, and if he’s as much of an asshole as his messages make him sound, he won’t think anything of it if she turns up asking for him one last time.”  
“Got the address?”  
“Yep.”  
“Then let’s go.”  
\-----------------------------------------------------------------  
They’re too late. Gwen can tell by the unnatural silence of the apartment as they enter. She knows what they’re going to find before they do, and stops in the doorway of what used to be Eddie Gwynne’s bedroom.  
“Tosh was right though.” Jack breaks the silence, stepping into the bedroom. “She went for the ex boyfriend. Lucky she’s young. If we were working our way through my back catalogue, we’d be here until the sun explodes.”  
Gwen ignores him. “But where’s she going to go next?”  
“And how long do we have before the avatar destroys her body?” Tosh asks, and Gwen can see her frowning.  
Jack leaves Eddie’s apartment without another word, the others following behind him. Gwen lingers a moment after everyone else, looking around the bedroom.  
“You coming, Gwen?” Tosh’s voice startles her a little and she turns, noticing her standing in the doorway.  
“Uh, yeah. Yeah, I am.” 

Jack’s already in the driver seat when she gets back into the car, pulling away from the house before she’s even fully buckled in. She understands not wanting to attract attention but it’s not like they’re going to blend it whatever they try and do. They’re in a massive black SUV, one of them looks like a corpse, one of them is possibly the most flirtatious human on earth, one of them has eight eyes, and it’s rare she can go somewhere without someone mentioning her hair. Inconspicuousness isn’t exactly something they have on their side.  
“So, what’s our next move?”  
“Stop the entire city of Cardiff from shagging?” Owen suggests, leaning forwards to turn the car stereo down.  
“We could put bromide in the water supply?” Gwen jokingly suggests, and is surprised when Jack shakes his head.  
“Nope, too hit and miss.”  
Owen nods in agreement. “Yeah, and the water company got really pissed off with us the last time we did that. There’s no way we’d be able to get away with it again.”  
“It could have used any body in Cardiff, why her?” Tosh asks, turning to look at Gwen, who is slightly taken aback by the question.  
“I assumed it was random.”  
Jack shakes his head, glancing into the back for a moment. “It’s already shown us that it’s smarter than that. If Owen’s right and it’s part of The Corruption then it’s deliberately mining her life to get what it needs.”  
“Then what else do we know about her that could give us a lead?” Owen twists fully in his seat to look at her, head on the back of the chair.  
“Why are you all looking at me?”  
Owen rolls his eyes, sliding back into his seat proper as Jack stops at a red light. “Because you did all of the profiling.”  
“I don’t know. Sorry.”  
Owen scoffs. “God, she’s really great under pressure. What I’d give to have Suzie back right about now. Tosh, anything you can give us?”  
“She’s a temp. Receptionist.” Gwen doesn’t know if Tosh has remembered that or if that’s one of those things she can just pull from thin air.  
“Where’s she working at the minute?”  
“I can pull her employment files up?” Remembered, then. “Conway Clinic.”  
Owen’s head thuds into the back of the seatrest, and he turns around again. “You’re shitting me.”  
Jack looks across at him. “What’s the problem?”  
He makes a soft noise of frustration in the back of his throat. “It’s a fertility clinic, Jack. Sperm donors. An unlimited supply of orgasmic energy without all of the faffing around to get there. It’d be bloody paradise for that thing.”  
“Great.” Jack jerks the wheel. “That’s all we need. Eager men indeed.”  
Owen reaches down into his footwell, passing a handgun back over his shoulder. “That’s for you, Newbie.”  
“What’s this for?”  
“What, you need a diagram?” Owen asks sarcastically, turning around again to face her, leaning over the back of his seat. Gwen wishes he’d pick a direction to face and just face it, she doesn’t like him twisting around while Jack’s driving like he is.  
“I’ve never used a gun.”  
Owen thuds back into his seat, exasperated, and Gwen hopes he stays there. “You were a copper!”  
“I was on the beat.”  
“God, now I really wish we had Suzie back.”  
Jack changes lanes, slowing at another red light and taking the opportunity to look over his shoulder at her. “Carry it. I’ll make sure you don’t have to use it.”  
“Okay, and what do we do when we find her?”  
“Judging by the results of all of Owen’s little tests, the avatar needs a host to survive.” Tosh tells her and Owen nods.  
“It’s impossible to perfectly replicate the conditions of the exact avatar we’re dealing with because it’s completely unique, but I managed to extract the base layer of The Corruption from my DNA and from what I can tell, at most it survived a few minutes outside of my body. But that was only a fragment, not the whole ava-”  
“You did what?” Jack asks, his anger clear in his tone, and Owen holds up a hand to him defensively.  
“I know. I know. It’s fine. I took it out of my blood, no more than a few drops at a time. It was an old piece of kit we found at Torchwood One that I kept stashed in a drawer, I reckon it was made by them for their freaky experiments.”  
“All the more reason why you shouldn’t have touched it.”  
“Does it matter? The point is, now we know that the avatar can’t survive without a host. All we have to do is isolate it from Carys’s body.”  
“And how do we do that?”  
“I was kinda hoping you wouldn’t ask me that question until I’d had time to think of an answer, to be quite honest with you.”  
“Well, you’d better think of one quick.” Jack says as he pulls the car up onto the pavement in front of the building. “Tosh, clear the building room, Owen, make sure she can’t get out the back. Gwen, behind me.” 

Owen makes his way to the back of the building, and Gwen follows Tosh and Jack through the front, sticking close to Jack. The gun in her hands feels awkward and heavy, and she feels better knowing that Jack’s done this sort of thing before. She follows him up the stairs, and part of her is annoyed with herself for feeling so secure around him. They’re after a young girl, she’s more of a danger to herself than she is to them and all of them know it by now. She can’t help but linger back though, letting Jack go first and being grateful when he doesn’t seem to expect her to step up. Not that she doesn’t want to, but she doesn’t want to. She doesn’t want to be the one to make the difficult decisions, she’ll leave that to Jack. He certainly seems to have something of a skewed moral compass however, and that doesn’t quite sit right with her. If there’s anyone she trusts to make those sorts of decisions, it’s Owen. He seems to have the most compassion out of the lot of them. He seems to care, and that clearly matters in a job like this. They don’t find Carys in any of the rooms that they search, though they can tell she’s been there. Death after death after death builds up around them. She’s only two days in and already this is what she’s facing.  
“Guys, down here!” Both her and Jack turn at the sound of Owen’s voice, heading back down the stairs. 

Carys is backed against the wall opposite the stairwell, Owen’s gun trained on her. Tosh approaches from her other side, gun aimed as well.  
“Nowhere to run.” Jack says, indicating the two blocked exits. “I’ll give you three guesses how this ends, though I don’t think you’ll need that many.”  
Carys smiles, though it isn’t Carys, Gwen can tell by the pink shimmer over her skin that it’s the avatar in control right now. “All this sex. All that we see, all that we think. There’s so much beauty and so much fear, and there is so much potential in the spaces in between.”  
“You need to get out of that body.” Owen tells the avatar.  
“I can’t.” Carys’s head turns to look at him. “I need it. I need what it gives me.”  
“I know.” Owen nods, smiles. “We’re both part of The Corruption, you and I. We want the same things. I freed you, remember? Think of how amazing we could be if we were one. Two fragments of The Corruption in one host. One complete person. Think of the potential, the desire. Doesn’t it sound perfect?”  
The avatar hesitates, Gwen can see it debating. She watches Jack slowly take something out of his pocket. The inflatable cell that Owen had used to catch Carys before. He turns the device over in his hand, inching closer to Carys.  
“I’m better for you.” Owen continues. “There’s more of The Corruption in me than there could ever be in her, and you know that. You could achieve more with me. So much more. The longer you spend with Carys, the weaker she gets. Me? I’d only get stronger.”  
Gwen can see the look in Owen’s eyes from here, and it worries her. He looks like he truly believes what he’s saying, like he actually wants to be one with the avatar. There’s none of the fear in his eyes now that she’d seen at the crash site. He almost looks excited, smiling.  
Carys slides down the wall, the pink film melting back into her skin as the avatar relinquishes control, making it’s choice. It takes form in front of them like it had at the crash site, gathering together into that vaguely humanoid shape again. It drifts towards Owen, who reaches a hand forwards like he’s inviting it to stand with him.  
Jack tosses the inflatable cell onto the carpet beneath the avatar and it expands, sealing it inside. Owen takes a few steps back, letting his hand drop and looking at Jack. “Thanks for that. Thought you were gonna let it get me then.”  
Jack glances Owen up and down and then looks back at the avatar. “Would that really have been so bad?”  
Owen frowns, brow furrowing a little. He has no idea what that’s supposed to mean. Did Jack want him to become one with it? Or did Jack just think that was what he had wanted? Like he’d ever actually want something like that. He’s been dragging his heels trying to avoid his Revelation for the last four years, he’s not just going to let another part of The Corruption take him over that easily. Jack should know him better than that.  
“How long can it survive in there?” Tosh asks.  
Owen looks at her, grateful for the distraction from Jack. “Not long. Why?”  
“Just worried about how long that battery’s going to last.” 

Owen takes a step back, looking down at the inflatable cell with a sudden alarm.  
“No.” Gwen shakes her head. “No. It’s dying.”  
“Fuck.” Owen breathes, already reaching for something to steady himself on. “Oh, fuck.”  
He stumbles backwards over his own feet, and Gwen watches him pale, the sickly grey of his skin giving way to that bloodless white. He finds one of the seats and sits, closing his eyes and letting his head drop, his hands curling into fists. “Die quickly, for the love of God. Please just die quickly.”  
Gwen turns her attention back to the avatar. It doesn’t look like it’s in pain but dying can’t be a comfortable sensation, not if Owen’s reaction is anything to go by. Feeling the pain of others that exist under the same entity, Jack had said something about that the other day. But she hadn’t felt Suzie’s death. Owen had, Jack said that had something to do with him being a protector, but she hadn’t felt anything. She watches the avatar turn to dust, and Owen lets out a shaky breath, like all of the tension is being drained out of him. Jack deactivates the cell a moment later and kneels, touching his hand to the remains gently. “You exist just to find companionship, and you still end up dying alone.”  
“Awfully cheery, that.” Owen’s voice is weak. “Someone fancy giving me a hand?”  
Jack looks up at Gwen and then over his shoulder. “You help Owen. I’ll get Carys.”  
\------------------------------------------------------------------  
Gwen is taking down the profile she’d set up about Carys when Jack appears at her shoulder. She watches his reflection as his hand comes to rest on her shoulder. “Still here? Everyone else has gone home, doing…..whatever it is they do when they’re not here.”  
“How long have you been watching me?” Gwen asks, and then decides that’s a pointless question to try and ask him. “I just wanted to finish up.”  
“Do one thing for me.” Jack says, and Gwen puts down the paper she’s holding, turning to face Jack and folding her arms.  
“What’s that?”  
“Don’t let this job consume you. Contrary to how it might seem, I don’t want to have to kill you. You’re almost fully human. That gives you a perspective, and we need that.”  
“Who are you, Jack?”  
He raises an eyebrow. “I’m sorry?”  
“You say you’re a Stage Four but you have almost nothing to show for it. We have no idea who you serve, you don’t exist anywhere that we can find you, you tell us that the twenty-first century is when everything changes, that we need to be prepared-”  
“Because you do.”  
“Prepared for what? Or don’t you know?”  
“You really think that knowing the answers would make you feel better?”  
Gwen hates the way Jack looks down at her as he says that, one eyebrow raised like she’s said something stupid that he finds particularly amusing. It’s patronising, and she can understand why Owen loses his temper with him enough.  
“Who are you? Really? Or don’t you know anymore?”  
Jack frowns, and she can tell she’s struck a nerve there. “Go home, Gwen Cooper. Be human while you still have the chance.”  
He turns away without saying anything else, and Gwen watches him until he’s out of sight, down in one of the many lower levels of the building he calls home. After a moment she turns back to the glass board and tears down one of the pictures of a young Carys, watching it catch and rip.  
_Go home. Be human._  
She does.


End file.
